The Shade by Victory Made

Disclaimer: It's my understanding that the Pauls, whom I reverence, allow this kind of thing to go on. I hope they don't change their minds and I certainly don't intend any profit or assault on copyrights. You'll know which characters are theirs theirs theirs by the fact you recognize them. And hark! in the distance, lawyers are laughing at the idea this statement might protect me.

Author's Notes: Thanks and more thanks to my husband for beta service, thanks and great admiration to the fanfic writers I've been reading for years, and, um, sincere apologies to the Tampa Police Department.

Story Notes: The R rating is primarily for language and some violence, since the sex is pretty much of the porn-what-porn variety. Not exactly a deathfic but a character is dead before the story starts; also, incurable diseases play a part in events. Spoilers for all seasons. Angst (surprise! though it's not unrelieved), established relationships.

Ray remembered a hotel room he'd sat in for way too long. Vecchio training him with heaps of photos and sarcasm, this FBI guy running things, checking his watch, sighing every five minutes on the dot. This guy who was wearing glasses and a little beard like it was a disguise, who wasn't a suit this time around, who was marching down the hospital corridor toward him.

"So it's the pinch-hitter again," said Special Agent Morland. He and Ray pressed up against opposite walls of the sort-of-green corridor, letting a gurney pass in a cloud of nurses and Southern accent.

"Are you here for..?"

"I'm not here." Morland moved quickly away.

"Hey! Hey!" Ray sprang after him. "Was it Mob action? Was it fallout from--"

"That's enough, Detective Kowalski." Morland sighed. "Come on, give up, it's rude to talk to people who aren't really there."

Ray heard a Chicago voice say "shit" not too far away. There went the advantage of surprise.

The fibbie took Ray's distraction as a chance to whisk himself around the nearest corner. It sounded like he was snickering.

********

"Vecchio."

"Go to hell, Stanley." Ray Vecchio lay on his side, legs drawn up. The bandage on his temple had a yellow halo of bruise inside a broad patch of twenty-five o'clock shadow. There was stubble on his face, too.

The bedside was free of tubes and IV stands and beeping crisis boxes. That relieved Ray's worries about whether he ought to wear out the invalid by asking questions. He stood by the nightstand, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. He reminded himself -- hospital zone, hold his voice down every minute.

"Tell me what happened," he said.

"Ask the local yokels."

"Been there, done that, bought the jacket." Ray leaned over the bed and dropped the folder on Vecchio's feet. "Brought the jacket, too."

There were several different shapes and colors of flower arrangements in the room. There weren't any Vecchios except the one. Ray wondered about that. Okay, the Miami Beach Vecchios were having a cold war with the Chicago branch, and Tampa wasn't right next door to Miami anyway, and Frannie had to finish up at the Academy, but it didn't seem like Ma to leave before her favorite figlio was back on his feet and fattened up.

Gradually, eyes still closed, Ray Vecchio rolled onto his back and straightened his body. He didn't wince but the masklike look on his face said everything about self-control. "These Southern-fried bozos never heard of privileged information?"

"They hearda professional courtesy, anyway."

"Ooo, new vocabulary for you. I guess some Mountie rubbed off on you?" Vecchio opened his eyes. They were dull like green-gray rocks, and the dullness made his face suddenly less familiar. "It must've been close quarters up north."

Ray started forward, eyes narrowing, fists rising. He stopped short, bouncing with the momentum, ran his hands through his spiked hair a few times, scratched a stubbly cheek. Huh. It should've been harder than that to stop himself. He'd come here expecting to bust the Style Pig's big nose down to a flat spot before he left. Maybe it was Vecchio's can't-be-bothered startup beard that stopped him--it was almost like having something in common.

"Vecchio, what we are not gonna do here. We are not gonna play button, button, who pushed my buttons. You are gonna tell me what the fuck happened. Because that is what you do about a crime. That is what you, especially, do about this crime, especially." By the end, Ray was talking in a rustle more than a voice. He blinked hard and told himself again, hold it all down.

"You already read the book," Vecchio kicked the blankets, knocking the folder to the floor, "you don't need the live performance. Now get the hell out of here and give me some quality time with the hole in my guts. Alone, you know?"

Ray sat. He could outwait Vecchio standing on his head. Standing on the tip of his pinky. He strummed the loose threads on the worn-out knee of his jeans.

"Is Big Red coming down?" Vecchio's voice was neutral and controlled. He'd closed his eyes again.

"You passed the word for us to hold off till you were healthy."

"Yeah, and look who's here anyway, Chicago's gift to the Ice Follies." Ray waited to see if any more 'close quarters' type shots were coming. Instead he got, "You're bad enough but Jesus, would you want Constable Courtesy for a nursemaid? I ask you."

The answer was yeah. Absolutely. Even if it meant being in a hospital. Why not a hospital? Missing Fraser was like missing a piece of his body. Like an amputee had a phantom limb, he had a phantom Mountie.

Ray said, "You're gonna get him, like it or not. I dunno when exactly. We got back to Inuvik and they stuck him on extended patrol. We talked on Radio Free Mountie. He asked me to convey his very sincere sympathies and his profound regrets."

No reply. A conversation that wasn't going to happen.

"You think it was a Mob hit?" Ray asked. Why else the fibbie?

"The shooter could've been a paisana but did you ever hear of a 'made woman' outside the moving pictures? I never did, not in Chicago or anywhere else located in reality. But maybe it could happen. Stranger things've happened," Vecchio said derisively, "once upon a time there was a one-legged man who was a big contract hitter. In the so-called 'Dixie Mafia,' you know, not the genuine Maf."

Somehow, some way, that sounded like a diversion.

Ray pushed. "Like ya have any idea whether the woman was the only perp there. It coulda been a couple, a team. What about somebody from the Families who's got a personal grudge against you or... not against you? Maybe from Chi, maybe 'anywhere else'?"

"Grudges happen, Stanley." A thin smile. "Say, you see the bedpan around here anywhere?"

"I'm so embarrassed, Vecchio. See my pink? Ya don't run me off that easy. In fact ya don't run me off at all."

"Do I have to get your scrawny punk ass bounced out of here?"

"You have got yourself a replacement bodyguard, Vecchio. Ya don't like it? Stick it in your bedpan."

"Yeah, I heard all about how you couldn't ever take no for an answer."

Right away Ray had one hand braced on the mattress, the other one a block of knuckles ready to slam down.

Vecchio took a deep breath and said, "Do it or stop blowing burger breath on me already." He didn't move anything else, not an eyelid.

Ray took three steps away and flung himself into the chair, which screeked and slid. He grabbed the TV remote and started punching the channel button instead of anybody who happened to be in the room with him. The time was on the hour and the ads roared out, made into little blips of Chinese water torture by all the channel jumps.

For that, Vecchio opened his eyes. "Mute that shit!"

Ray gave him a big smiley thumbs-up and did the mute thing. Taking his win, he said, "Ya got no odds any bookie would touch that the shooter didn't mean to do you too. Ya pretty much lost your memory of that night, right? So ya don't know how many shooters, right? Ya don't know whether they got scared off before they could finish, right? I bet yes. Anybody comes back to do the invalid? I'm gonna be here." Because the Stella wouldn't have been satisfied with anything less.

********

Ray settled his scrawny punk ass in for maybe the ten-zillionth long ball-breaker of a stakeout in his life. This time he had a folder full of reading material and just to add to the ambuance he had nurses. Three of them. Nurse Ratched in three different sizes and decorator hair colors. Fortunately them and their torture tools were Vecchio's problem, not his.

He could start reading any time now.

His mind strayed over to Fraser but it couldn't go very far in that good a direction right now.

He opened the folder and closed it again.

"Vecchio."

A sigh.

"Vecchio. What was that prick Morland doing here?"

"Don't bother your pretty little head about that."

Button, button...

"Were you two having a little chat about where you got the money to pay for the bowling alley?"

The question made Vecchio look straight at him, which was a lot easier on the eyes than getting the profile view of the giant economy-size honker.

"Yeah, his big-shot Uncle gave me the loan. It was a special quiet deal for a guy who'd been around the track a few times."

Got it, undercover work. 'Around the track?' Means a gambling investigation? Shyeah, Vecchio had the Vegas track record for it.

"You get a lot of gamblers at the lanes?"

Vecchio almost snorted. "Sure we do. Also we get... the business got pensioners, old-timers, the kinda people you expect in a place called 'Classic Lanes' that shows old silent movies on screens back behind the pins. The kinda people who have a lotta medical care issues. Opens them up for medical ID theft, insurance ripoffs, counterfeit meds, those are big money down here in blue-rinse heaven."

"Did she know?" Ray asked. Like, did she have a fair chance to stay clear of your undercover and be safe?

"Wild horses couldn't have dragged her away even an inch, Stanley."

They traded stares. Vecchio looked away first, but he'd gotten it right and Ray knew it. Stella never backed off on a prosecution in her life. "Sometimes you make mistakes, Ray, sometimes you lose, but you never surrender."

********

Ray watched the tube till he couldn't keep the file away from his eyes any longer.

"Vecchio," after the first page or maybe two.

"Got a short attention span there, Stanley?"

"You did this check the doors and windows shit every time you came home?"

"I always checked the car, too. And the lanes."

"So ya hadda routine. Anybody who watched you woulda known it."

"They'd've known I was looking for obvious signs of a B&E. They wouldn't've known I had tricks to spot a sneak entry." Vecchio kept his eyes aimed at the screen.

"Ya saw the signs the front door had been opened since you left and ya went in anyway."

As fast as if he'd been looking at what he was grabbing for, as fast as if he was healthy, Vecchio grabbed the folder and flipped through it.

"What the fuck?"

"I thought maybe you weren't reading it right side up." Breathing unevenly, he slung the file back and lay down. His face was masked up again. "You missed the point by a mile. We had in-depth defense. See the part about my remote?"

"One button makes a distraction back at the far end of the house. Another button makes the lights flash, the locks--"

"I already know the punch line."

"The one where ya didn't call the cops?"

"They were called. Right away."

"Stupid fucking stupid, Vecchio."

Vecchio's eyes stayed fixed straight ahead at the tube. Ray looked at him, looked at the file, started reading again. He flipped the corner of the paper back and forth with his fingertip, tick tick tick tick.

RV: I told my wife to talk like she'd left something back at the restaurant, then drive two blocks away, slouch down in the seat, and call in. Tell them we had a B&E, no visible intruder, her husband was going in armed, and they should contact a car on the phone not the radio. Because... Det. WT: Yeah right, the pros all have their damn little scanners. RV: I didn't see any parked cars from outside the neighborhood so I figured no one was there who'd follow her. So she performed loud and clear and I played up, popped off with some kind of shot at her about glitches in her memory. In her memory. Some remark like. I. I better. Oh Jesus. Det. WT: Hold on, let me get the nurse in here. --break-- RV: I heard the engine start and I put the key in the lock, making your normal not a care in the world homecoming noises. When she drove off and nobody followed her, I started up, okay, break here would you, I'm not going to talk about my security system for the public record. --break-- RV: I went in low and got behind the davenport. Then the uh this and that shut off. The intruder had some way to control it and block me out. Det. WT: Jamming. Home invasion shit. RV: A couple of the inside lights stayed on. I thought that was the intruder's mistake till now. Then she started shooting around the hall corner and we exchanged fire. Det. WT: She? Not your wife. RV: The shooter. Here's where I was. Davenport. Here's the hall. Here's the mirror on the other wall and I could see her reflection as clear as TV. Det. WT: Did you see anyone else? RV: No. Right about there is where I don't remember what happened next.

"Fuck!" Ray could see it like a spotlight was on it. "Oh, fuck."

Vecchio sighed. "Nice rhyme scheme you got going there."

"Shut the fuck up." Ray thumped himself on the knee. "This bitch was using a silencer, right?"

"Of course."

"None of the shots broke the front windows?"

Vecchio shook his head.

"She was trying to lure Stella in." The name was out in the room now, pulsing like a heart. "She finishes shooting you. It's quick and quiet, then the bitch lights up the house like a normal evening. Stella comes back, sees no evil, hears no evil, she thinks it's all clear."

"Like that."

"Ya remember the exchange of fire?"

"Like I said."

"And that's it?"

"Like I said."

"But ya remember the part where you made the dumbshit fuckwitted decision to go in there--"

"Like I said." Vecchio was getting quieter and smoother every time. "Learn to read, Stanley."

Det. WT: This is going to sound like 20-20 hindsight, but why'd you go inside? RV: You know what would have happened if I didn't? The intruder would have done a roadrunner when he realized I knew he was there. Next time he'd come back smarter than before and he'd get a better shot at us. I figured I'd pin him down till you staunch defenders of the public peace arrived to back me up. I'd told my wife to go to the station and wait for news. She was blocks away. I thought.

"Learned anything yet?"

"Yeah," said Ray, standing, shaking, "I learned some anatomy. If you had any fucking brains, you woulda taken Stella away from there. Personally. She'd still be alive."

Instant vitality in Vecchio's eyes, and it looked like it belonged to one of the world's coldest living things.

"That's it? You came chasing all the way from the Arctic Circle to sunny Tampa, Florida just to piss and moan about what can't be fixed. Ever." The mask came back, but Vecchio's eyes didn't change. "Let me save us both valuable time and guess a couple of your other little whines. You think Stella should've been buried up in Chicago, right? No. She was done with there, all done, you can take my word on that. You think I should've held off on the funeral till you got the word and mushed down here, right? Tough. You can't expect to reach out and touch someone when you got a polar bear for an answering service. That's all, folks. Be sure and let the door hit your butt on the way out."

Bang bang bang on target. Why not? Vecchio'd been lying there thinking about it all for a long time. Ray had been too, not as many days but the same kind of long time, and his brain kept bringing up more things that he wasn't going to let slip out. It was sick, sick, sick to fight with a man who'd seen, who'd maybe seen, who'd seen even if he couldn't or maybe wouldn't remember, his wife being shot in-- shot dead.

Ray paced. He sat. He paced again. As he got close to the doorway he caught Vecchio looking relieved, looking hopeful, looking practically human, so he sat himself down again. He turned away from the bed.

Shit. You're a real nice guy, Stanley Ray Kowalski. You're a fucking prince. What happened to 'hold it all down'?

Talk nice or talk nasty. Who cares? It isn't like it'll bring her back.

Then he heard that in his head, making echoes, all the things he tried that didn't bring Stella back to him, all the things that were like echoes backwards in time. This one the loudest and final one, every earlier one a little quieter than what came next.

********

It was important to know where you were as soon as you woke up because you could be in Chicago or, God help you, Canada. Or Vegas. Or you could be down, you could be laid out on the floor of your living room. The faster you located yourself the faster you could get control of the situation.

The fuzziness from last night's pain pills drained away some. Without opening his eyes or changing his breathing, Ray listened.

Oh, shit, Kowalski was still right here smack dab in the middle of the morning, breathing and rattling papers. It had to be him. It wasn't like a nurse would be slacking off in the guest chair reading the news, not in this kind of exposed position where Queen Nurse the First could spot her.

You pick a guy to be your outside layer of cover, because you read his record and it looks like he has some smarts and he'll treat everyone in your life decent, and it ends up working against you in ways where you never would've thought ways existed. What was he going to do about this mess? Kowalski was bad enough, not that he could've been kept out after Stella. But Fraser, Fraser had to stay out of this. And the way Fraser and Kowalski were, anywhere the Polack went the lamb was sure to go.

"Wakey wakey, Vecchio."

Something that felt like paper with a hard point on it scraped across the skin on the top of his head.

It was a paper airplane, for Christ's sake. He guessed that was payback for him tossing the Kleenex box at Kowalski's back last night when the guy broke down.

"What's this, a Polish alarm clock?" No point pretending he'd been asleep.

"That," said Kowalski with a tight little smile, "is my personal hand-made mockup of what flew in through the door around four in the AM. I picked up the original and you know what? I keeled. Think I was only out a minute or two, 'cause the water from the glass I knocked over was still dripping off the chair when I woke up. And the plane was gone. Now this, this is a photocopy of what somebody pinned to your blanket while I was out." He rattled a couple of sheets of paper.

Ray could see through the backmost sheet of paper to the dark rectangles printed on the other side. Shit. Fuck.

When you wanted to keep your real facial expression to yourself, pain was a good cover, one of the best. Ray started on the physical-therapy routine known as "getting his ass planted on the edge of the bed."

"You gonna fall over or what?" Kowalski was trying not to look concerned, but he was poised to jump and catch.

"Swooning is your girly little vice, Stanley, not mine."

The woman who shot the Vecchios was wearing a pinstriped pantsuit with a long-sleeved jacket and dark leather gloves. The colors were greens and grays. Her shoes were low-heeled black ankle boots. There was no sign or sound of a third person in the house. Her watch, which was on her left wrist, had a segmented ivory band set with quite a few white brilliant-cut stones.

She had dark curling hair that was short of shoulder-length, no earrings, green or hazel eyes, and stood between five foot seven and six feet tall in shoes that didn't have much heel. There was a white scar under the tip of her chin, the size and shape that a fingernail would make if it was driven in. The four attached photos, which come from a web search, are of women whose faces resemble hers reasonably closely. The closest matches were all Greek women.

Ray wiped the palms of his hands on his blankets. He knew what came next.

"You're getting it back," said Kowalski, eying him.

Ray knew he had to look at the mugshots at this point or else Kowalski would add something up. He looked like he was doing calculations already.

"Greek, you think?" asked Kowalski.

"I said Mediterranean-looking, before, and that's what I stay with."

"You remembering anything yet?"

Ray let his head drop down. Let the punk wonder if that was a nod yes. After a minute, he started reading again, buying himself time.

After she shot Mr. Vecchio, she said, "You're still a bad shot."

Later Vecchio was trying to pick up his gun and couldn't. The woman kicked the gun away. She pointed her gun at his stomach and said, "That was how you pay for shooting Ben."

"This is all supposed to make us think it was Victoria Metcalf, right down to the diamonds. Was it her, Vecchio?"

Ray's teeth hurt as much as his guts. He didn't want to answer Kowalski and maybe he couldn't have made the muscles let go to open his jaws anyway.

After the woman shot Mrs. Vecchio, she said, "She's finished. And it isn't collateral damage. It's how you pay for separating me from Ben." She brought a black leather handbag from the hall and opened it. "And this is how you pay for everything I had to do to get back the money I went to prison for." Then she kicked Vecchio in the head.

"No," said Ray. He hated his voice. It gave away too much and it was going to keep right on giving. Christ, there wasn't a hope. "The shooter looked a lot like Metcalf but it wasn't her."

"You sure about that?" Kowalski's voice wasn't loud.

"I'd know that snake bitch from hell anywhere, anytime, and if I was blind I'd know her voice."

"Do you remember what happened that night?"

"Yeah. This thing is right. This thing brings it back like instant replay."

I viewed the events of that night in a type of psychic vision. Afterwards I realized the murderer's face was already slightly familiar. I'm nearly certain I've seen her twice, in passing: first in the 200 corridor on the first floor of St. Joseph's Hospital, no later than June 30th 1998 and possibly as much as two weeks earlier, and again outside the door of the Moffitt Cancer Center on July 16th.

Ray dropped the papers on the floor and Kowalski picked them up.

"You want I should call the nurse?"

"You can call a call-girl for all I care." Remembering his Vegas lessons, Ray made his face suit his purposes and looked up at the punk.

"Ya think someone's yanking your chain?" Kowalski asked. He seemed to have a focus for once. It was a hostile one.

"Go to the head of the class. If it was Victoria Metcalf she wouldn't've let me live."

"Some kinda misdirection going on, then." Kowalski's voice was neutral. As he went to the door and closed it, he didn't stop watching Ray. "Maybe a trick to get us to check out those sightings, end up framing somebody."

"The sightings are bullshit. That note is just to muddy the waters."

"I wondered." Kowalski pulled the chair over where he could sit facing Ray, planting himself backwards on it, a skinny jeans leg splayed out to each side. "Ya know? I kinda wondered why your family wasn't here. I woulda thought Ma, your Ma I mean, and even Frannie couldn'ta been picked up off you with a fork-lift."

"I told them not to come." Ray stared back.

"Yeah. I get that. You were scared of what Metcalf would do to them."

"No, Kowalski, this is Mob all the way. You think they couldn't've got into precinct records?"

"No," Kowalski pointed at Ray with both hands. "No, Vecchio, it's, what's it, it's omerta all the way. You and Metcalf. Your personal vendetta, your rules, no cops allowed to play with your toys, is that it?"

Kowalski stood up suddenly, straddled over the chair. Ray braced himself, watching the other ex-cop's rapid and dangerous hands more than his face.

"You fuckhead!" The chair tumbled. Eyes blazing, Kowalski flung his arms forward. "All this time you knew who shot Stell and ya--"

"Yeah, I didn't say. What good was the bitch's name gonna do them? Has anyone ever caught her by calling her name out loud? I gave the Tampa detectives a good description of her, the same as that message does, right?"

"I am gonna make a call," Kowalski said as carefully as reciting unfamiliar poetry, "and then I am gonna beat ya into blood pudding."

This was what Ray had been saving and hiding his strength for. He lunged for Kowalski's cellphone while it was still clearing the jeans pocket, and on the way he knocked the room phone off back behind the nightstand. Half of Ray was snarling and gripping, and the other half was being torn off of him at the middle. Finally his hands let go of the phone of their own accord and pressed against his stomach, and he fell back on the bed.

"God, Vecchio." Kowalski sounded disgusted as much as shocked. He poked the nurse call button and picked up the phone from the floor.

"Stella is dead," Ray gasped. "Fraser is still alive. Do you want to keep him that way?"

He couldn't see too clearly but it was possible Kowalski was standing absolutely still for once in his twitchy life.

"You just gotta get that phone up next to your mouth? Okay," Ray said. "Don't call the Tampons. Call Fraser and tell him I'm recovering fine and he doesn't need to come down here."

"You weren't gonna warn Fraser about her?"

"You can't warn him. It can't be done. All you can do is lure him and help her set him up. You haven't seen him when he's under that snake bitch's spell."

Kowalski looked down at the night-stand and pushed the lamp electric cord back and forth a few times before he answered.

"She could get to him up North, too. The cabin fire, she did that, right? He's gotta be warned."

"She wouldn't have left that letter here except she's trying to force my hand. She wants to bring him here and she wouldn't be trying for that if he wasn't safe from her where he is. Kowalski, you gotta let everyone keep thinking it's Mob."

"The only Mob-related thing about this is you."

Now that was just too much coming from this smart-mouth spiky-haired punk with the dress sense of a bag lady, this guy who hadn't grown up cousin to the Mob and hemmed in by the Mob and eventually with Mob soldiers of his very own--it was too much. Ray tried to put his fist through Kowalski's solar plexus and missed. The next thing he saw, after your basic black, was his own hands hanging down. He was sitting flopped forward with his chest down on his thighs, looking at very heavy hands that had strange pale fingernails and skin that was possibly greenish instead of olive.

Someone with smaller pink hands rearranged him. Nothing hurt any less but now his head was between his knees. Then Ray understood, gradually less and less vaguely, that the voices in the room had something to do with Kowalski getting reamed... something like, he could be removed just as fast as any other visitor who threatened a patient even though he wasn't doing it with a smoking gun... no matter what the police said! They could just send someone else around to be a guard instead. Someone with civilized respect for crime victims.

The nurse moved Ray around piece by piece till he was lying on the bed with his feet propped up higher than his head. Kowalski was near the door, shoulders hunched. He had the good manners to look away when the nurse argued with Ray about the pain pills. Ray put them on hold. For now.

"Do you want this man to stay or go?" she asked.

"He isn't any big deal," Ray said. "He can stick around." He looked at Kowalski. "But you're gonna have to take a rain check on that pudding, Stanley."

"Yeah. I'll do that thing." Kowalski kept watching him with eyes like blue diamonds. The only thing about him that didn't look cheap for the sake of cheap.

********

"You didn't recognize her before but now you're sure it was her." Detective Triff was doing suspicion. Ray gave him eight out of ten.

Vecchio poked a finger at the evidence bag. "Nobody in the world but Victoria Metcalf would've had a reason to say this."

This? Was not going well. No reason it should. Vecchio was giving up his story as grudgingly as he could. The details were there, but the tone of voice said withholding, withholding. Any cop knew what to make of that. Ray was starting to think Vecchio was playing the old game of making the truth sound like a lie. Fucker.

"Was anybody else in the room with the shooter?"

"No."

"No other witnesses."

"I didn't see any."

"And now you're sure you remember ev-rything you saw and ev-ry word she said." Detective Kaufman's patter was along the lines of light-hearted doubt-it-all. Five out of ten. Better than Dewey could've done, give him that.

Vecchio told what he remembered, pushing his pills around on the nightstand with a finger while he talked. He had details that weren't in the note, things about clothes and accessories. Custom designed, he said. Ray's intuition said, this story is unbreakable.

"Okay, over to you, Stan," said Kaufman.

"That's Ray."

"You wouldn't want me to confuse you with that guy Vecchio there, would you?" Kaufman grinned. "You found this miracle memory-massage message on the bedstand?"

"It was pinned to his blanket."

"Pinned." Kaufman had a happy, humoring tone of voice. "That's considerate. That's almost as nice as being tucked into bed by your momma. Did you save the pin for a memento?"

Glaring, Ray applauded for that line.

"Did you see who brought it?"

"No."

"But you were awake and watching for intruders all night." The twerp was practically chirping.

Vecchio smirked, not at full strength. Ray scowled and told the paper airplane story. Right away the Tampa boys invented whole new ways of spraying disbelief around.

Dumbasses. Like he'd invent a story that freaky. It told him one thing, this wasn't some kind of local new crime technology that Tampa knew about and Chicago didn't.

After the happy skeptic outbreak shut down, Triff said heavily, "I'd say somebody cooked up this li'l goodie on a computer and printed it out. So I'm gonna check around the hospital, find out where the nearest printer is, who has access, whether patients do, whether their visitors do, 'cause I don't think this is what it seems to be at all."

"Yeah," said Vecchio just as heavily. "That's the Victoria Effect, all right. Just like last time."

Worse, Ray thought. How had Metcalf managed to make a paper airplane that knocked him out when all he did was touch it? That was a lot more high-tech than overriding Vecchio's security system. That was Man From UNCLE, that was Mission Impossible, that was Spy Versus Spy. What had she been teaching herself these last three years?

********

"Did you get the fax?"

"Yes. Thank you kindly. I did."

Frase sounded like he'd been beat up by Warfield's experts all over again. Shit, that hurt to hear.

"The Tampa boys didn't find any prints or DNA on the original."

"It hardly comes as a surprise."

Ray had picked this spot in the lobby because it left him clear of the traffic through the hospital doors and he could see through the potted plant if anybody got close enough to hear. Now two suits parked themselves on the other side of the plant. The one with the Vecchio-type suit was talking human subjects and massive legal liability. The one in the "hey, get off my case, I put on a suit for you didn't I" kind of suit wanted to sue a TV station. In the most long-winded possible way.

Ray rattled the plant at them.

"Hey, you. Ya want an audience? I'm here for ya."

They left just about as fast as he wanted them to. All the time, Fraser hadn't said jack.

"Whaddaya say, Ben?" The name came out harder back in the US.

Fraser sighed. "The photos and dialogue in the missive certainly support identifying the murderer as... Victoria Metcalf. The authorship is less straightforward. Two kinds of information are absent: clues that would help us locate the killer, and key details that only she could know--the latter being distinct from the facts that someone could obtain from access to police investigation records."

"Yeah, right," Ray could hear himself sliding into babble mode, couldn't head it off, "we get a hook into the case and what is it? Is it a red herring? Is it a shark fin? Is it the big one that gets away?"

"Some variety of fishiness is indicated." Better. There might've been some kind of faint smile going on up North.

"The local PD thinks it's fish from here down to twenty thousand leagues under."

His own share of the fishtank, paper planes and too soon we meet the floor, that part Ray felt safe talking about. Vecchio's share... shit, the guy was still Fraser's best friend. Sacred ground. So Ray did just the facts, ma'am. Vecchio motives, not a word. Just Vecchio memory version uno, Vecchio memory version two. Fraser absorbed it. You could hear the little sucking-it-into-brain-cells noises like a dry sponge when you add water.

"Might I speak with Ray?" he asked.

"He needed some painkillers. He's out of it right now."

"Ah."

The Canadian unword made Ray twitch by reflex. Guilt reflex.

"Is he in earshot, Ray?"

"Not unless he has X-ray ears."

"How is he doing?"

"When he was still undercover as mob? The kiss-of-death look on his face and the mustache he coulda drawn on with eyebrow pencil? Outa the corner of my eye, sometimes, I'm seeing that stupid little mustache again."

"I'm sorry to hear that." Fraser sounded worried.

Ray twitched by a different kind of reflex. "Ask me how I'm taking it, why don't ya?"

"Ray." Fraser paused. "I intended no insensitivity. I'd already spoken with you about Stella's death and I didn't want to presume further on your grief." It sounded like a candid explanation because that was what Fraser did to be slippery.

Sure, Frase had spoken with him about it. Listened to him about it, bandaged his knuckles about it, mended the wall and the chair about it. That was good. He hadn't been pissy even once. That wasn't so good. It was nursy. It wasn't human. It wasn't personal. It wasn't even buddies, much less on beyond buddies like it had been and should've been.

Ray realized he didn't feel angry, he felt stubborn. Like an ant dragging something a hundred times his size.

"Ya didn't want to presume. Because when you presume, you make a prez of you and me, is that it?"

"I don't quite--"

"I'll tell ya how I'm taking it. It isn't the same world I woke up in three days ago in Tiktaktoktuk before I knew Stell had been shot in the face."

"Ray..."

"It is not the same world, Frase."

This one was a personal silence.

"Tell ya something else. The real reason you didn't ask me?"

"Really, Ray. Since the reason I adduced was my only reason--"

Snippy! Houston, the human has landed.

"You know what I'm talking. It's all about the elephant in the room, the thing you put your hands on and then you say it's a rope or a snake or naugahyde or whatthefuckever."

"Language, Ray. And I am, in fact, familiar with the metaphor--"

"Cut the metaphooey, Fraser. Wouldya?"

Fraser let out a long sigh. "Yes, Ray. I see the elephant. Had I apprehended Victoria Metcalf in Chicago, Stella would still be alive. You, and I daresay Ray Vecchio, aren't the only ones to have focused on that point. My superiors have as well. Had it not been for unusual budgetary constraints, they would be sending another constable with me to keep me on the straight and narrow."

He sounded resigned, not sarcastic. Ray could see the face of phantom Fraser and, yeah, it hurt as much as the real thing.

"Point your ears this way and listen." Ray said it gently. "I do not mean that I don't trust you. If I had nine lives like a cat, I'd trust you with ten plus lots, you get that? My point is, this is not something where being quiet about it is a good thing, like silence is twenty-four-kay. Right here, right now, silence is like, uh, something big that collapses under you in all directions and lotsa people get flattened."

He heard Fraser take a breath, and cut him off. "And your asswipe superiors can go ride a caribou. With piles." Which gave the Mountie two choices.

"A hemorrhoidal caribou wouldn't benefit from being ridden." Gotcha. Fraser wasn't going to touch "language," not when he could grope grammar instead.

"Freak."

"How are you doing, Ray?"

"Part-time good, Ben. Better because you asked, ya see? Better than Vecchio, any road. About him? We gotta watch out for him."

Fraser said slowly, "'Watch out for' is ambiguous, Ray."

"Yeah, and Vecchio is am-bigtime-uous."

"Understood."

********

Vecchio was heavier than he looked, or maybe it was the wheelchair that was heavy, and the lobby was all of a sudden an obstacle course. Plants in pots, folding divider screens, lots of goony-looking... Oh shit. Reporters. The best-looking ones were hanging with a couple of TV cameras. The guy who was talking in long words from a position of up against the wall was wearing a "see I'm wearing a real suit." Ray looked around for the guy who shopped where Vecchio did. Not there. Okay, he was too smart to be here.

"A couple of familiar faces over there." Vecchio angled his face away from the media.

"Gotcha."

Ray wrestled the chair onto a different tack that would let them dodge behind the blue divider.

"Incoming," said Vecchio.

Ray glanced out of the corner of his eye. "On it."

The media dude came around the divider and met Ray right up in his face.

"Say bye-bye."

The reporter made some noises of protest. His T-shirt said "World's Greatest Reporter," with a picture of the world Mars in the middle of the slogan. Nerd city.

Bracing himself and drawing back a fist, Ray said, "One more step and I'm gonna send you to your home planet."

"Newsflash, bro, cops can't get away with that shit nowadays."

Back at the main event, somebody who had an amplifier helping him said, But do you have any explanation?

"Newsflash, asshole, that's the wrong diagnosis." Ray put on his best feral look. "I am not employed as a cop nowadays. This look like a badge to you?" He brought the fist in for a close-up, the quickest way. Vecchio's freshly shaved face was smiling in a way that looked gentle until you looked again.

The invader from Mars pulled back fast enough to make the ratty visor of his baseball cap bounce a little.

...experimental treatment is being tried out?

No.

"Ya came here about experiments, huh? Here's one for ya," Ray said eagerly. "I can knock your head around through a one-eighty and you can start using your ass for cleavage."

... percentage of recoveries is well within the limits of statistical insignificance...

"It ain't any coincidence that dirty cops always find each other, is it?" asked the Mars bar, sidling away.

The whole room turned the color of pissed-off. Ray cut the reporter off from an escape route in one long ballet step. He glided in, fists bunched. "Ya wanna clarify that?"

...how can you explain that condition being as good as new overnight?

Mars Attacks found himself trapped against the divider. "Come on, you didn't really think it was a secret, did you?"

Vecchio, still smiling, held the divider steady. He said, "You didn't think it was a big shocking moment, did you? For a media hack to pop off with shit like that? Whoa. You really did. Hey, Kowalski..."

Startled to hear anything but 'Stanley,' Ray glanced back at Vecchio. "Yeah?"

The response was a couple of fluid hand and eyebrow gestures conveying what a clueless boob and pointless waste of skin Marvin the Martian was and definitely not worth even a kick in the head.

...edge of death...

Ray chuckled shortly. He told Mars, "We gotta rule in this zoo. Don't feed the vultures. So flap off."

"Clever." The reporter turned his attention, except for the jumpy corner of his eye, to Vecchio. "Okay, you, I have just one question for you, and this is one you don't have to be afraid of."

"One," said Vecchio, the corners of his wide Italian mouth curling.

"You were here last night, weren't you? Did you notice any odd occurrences?"

Ray's cool slammed down to cover up his face.

He said, "The answer to question number one? Yeeeah, he was here last night."

"By any chance, did anything happen for which there wasn't any kind of natural explanation?"

"Can ya count above one?" Ray held up three fingers and shoved his face towards the Martian's.

...completely idiopathic in nature...

"'Idiopathic,' yeah, right," Vecchio said to Ray coolly, as if the reporter wasn't there. "The doctors use that word a lot because it means they don't have to understand what's going on as long as they have a word for it."

Ray said distractedly, "Why I stay outta hospitals." He had three trains of thought running. He picked one to derail. "You," to the reporter. "How 'bout you? You like to stay outta hospitals too?"

He spread his arms wide like a gate swinging open to let the Red Planet pass. "Be my guest."

Mars shook his head like he was handing out a warning, then gave up. He angled off to intercept another patient. This one was a big woman leaning on a small woman friend, a slow-moving easy target.

Ray's trains kept running.

...five unexplainable cases in less than 24 hours...

Arriving on track one. Dirty cop. Vecchio. Up in Chicago all they ever had was doubts but down here they were sure? This did not exactly match up.

On track B. Strange happenings last night. Had Tampa PD leaked to Mars about the note? Or had something else happened here too? It kinda sounded--

"Hey, Stanley, make like a source of motive power already."

Ray started pushing again. Pushing. Yeah.

********

Finishing a sweet turn around a corner, which was about the only chance of making a car dance that he'd had since he hit the senior-citizen Tampa traffic, Ray said, "Nine keys of China white."

"Is that an offer?" Vecchio raised his eyebrows.

"It's a math problem. Like, ten kilos drops into Ray Vecchio's hands out in the field when a pusher's arrested, one kilo makes it home to evidence control."

"That's a crossword clue, not math homework. Five letters and it starts with the third letter of the alphabet." He smirked at the stare Ray gave him. "Cover, Stanley. When an ex-cop who was crooked like a paper clip runs his own social center, shall we say a bowling alley, he can make a lotta contacts and do a whole lotta laundering for somebody." Vecchio's expression changed into above-it-all. "If he has the right background on the record to attract a somebody."

"Big talk, Vecchio, but this project is not some kind of national monument. The fibbies wouldn't start doing groundwork a year in advance. Try again."

"A year? What is this shit?"

"I got IAD sicked on me maybe a week after Frase and I partnered up. Stoolie named Siracusa blew off about the niner. He said the whole department was dirty, Welsh was deep in the shit, and you were named after Mr. Mud."

Vecchio's face went still. "Frankie Siracusa is FBI property."

Ray banged his palm on the steering wheel as he got stuck behind a big fat geriatric slowboat for the fifth time.

"I don't give a shit if J. Edgar autographed the Siracusan ass," he said. "What're ya saying, the fibbies told him to yadda yadda and sabotage their own undercover job?"

"Hell no, that was him buying himself some new friends in IAD."

"What was the rest of it?"

"I got a bad feeling that I'm not gonna like the answer to that question when I figure it out," Vecchio said slowly. "Did my family buy the story?"

"Not that I ever heard."

"Did Fraser?"

"Like ya have to ask? Course not. Should he?"

"Course not," Vecchio mimicked.

It sounded like the real answer. So why didn't it answer anything?

********

Before Vegas: Morland said, "Whatever you need to do to maintain your cover and get the info, do it. It'll all be swept under the carpet when you finish, and you know what the pattern on the carpet says? 'Line of duty.'"

And the agent had looked envious.

After Vegas: Morland said, "Believe me, after a nut-crusher job like that the last thing you want to do now is sit in Chicago trying to do what you used to do. You need to ramp down. We have an easy job in Tampa with your name written on it, and underneath it says, 'well done, good and faithful servant.'"

And the agent had looked encouraging.

After Stella: Morland said, "You've gotten a lot of publicity here, so we can't use you. But business is business. Someone will come around to buy the alley from you in a little while when the fuss dies down. Then go on back to Chi-town. The closing credits say, 'you're off the hook and free as a bird.'"

And the agent had looked professional.

Afterthought: it sounded just like when a cop tells a suspect, "Yeah, you and I have a deal, so you're gonna get off easy."

And I know where you can buy a old-fashioned-quality bridge that's a real bargain. It fell off a truck.

"Vecchio."

"What."

Triff had dumped all of Ray's kitchen spice containers into evidence bags, with a container next to each bag. "Anything here look phony?" Triff asked.

"There's nothing here that doesn't belong."

"You think I can trust your funny li'l memory on that?"

Ray gave the detective a look of patience, the way the Nevada desert is patient on a clear night when the cold sky settles down. He craned up out of the wheelchair and looked at the spices, the pots and pans, the... when he got to the curtains and plates and cutlery, those were all pieces of Stella and he didn't look so hard.

Kowalski wasn't looking at all. He'd been pale when they pulled up outside Ray's house. He'd turned green like an unripe apple when they came in and the smell hit. He'd shrunk down tight like an over-age apple when he saw the big gaps in the living-room carpet where the evidence had been cut loose and taken away. Now he was faced away leaning against the glass patio door just like it was a cool refreshing experience, which it wasn't at this time of day even though the daily rain had started.

Well... Ray couldn't help but guess how Kowalski felt, but it would be a luxury to feel how he felt. It wasn't the ex-husband's job to close out this business in an appropriate manner. It was the husband's. He had to do whatever he needed to do. After that he could feel whatever he needed to feel.

"So here I am spending hours not clearing the rest of my caseload," Triff said sourly, "and I'm finding not one single happy li'l clue."

"That's right, Triff, think little," said Ray. "Last time it was a locker key hidden in a snow globe souvenir."

"Snow, nice white powdery stuff, that doesn't surprise me. What was in the locker?"

Without turning around, Kowalski said, "Twenty-five thousand dollars in bills, in sequence, out of a half-mil from a bank robbery up in Alaska."

"That was the frame?"

"That," Ray took back the briefing, "plus she stole my partner's gun to shoot her partner, and my backup gun to shoot my partner."

"You?" Triff asked Kowalski.

"Fuck, no."

"God, no," Ray said at the same time.

"You sure 'bout that? You sound like partners." Triff opened another cabinet. He looked archly at Ray over his shoulder. "She had to go to so much trouble to frame you. Guess that was only 'cause she couldn't get into the precinct records."

Kowalski grunted.

Triff peered up into the cabinet. "Yup, that sweet li'l thang must be just one more of the special people who have a killer imagination. There's a lot of that going around lately, you know?"

********

A double glass door airlock at the front of the bowling alley, a window opening direct into the alley's office, a window and a hollow-core door into the snack center, another equally chickenshit door in back for maintenance. They all had locks that looked like gonzo protection, and they'd open by you tickling them with your pinky. The alley might be the Style Pig's new home, but it was not repeat not his fortress.

What it was, was his arsenal. Ray found Vecchio in his office with guns spread out all over his big shiny wood desk, which was otherwise cleared. He was checking the action on them and loading them. Gave a whole new meaning to the way he'd insisted on getting out of the hospital "for his health."

"You been keeping those here?" Ray asked. Had to be. They couldn't have come from the car or the house, he'd've seen.

"In this very room." Vecchio picked up a revolver.

"This place have any of those fancy-shmancy security systems?"

"What you see is what you get, Stanley. That big-shot Uncle I mentioned wouldn't spring for anything on his property like what we, what I had at home."

We. I. Ray flashed back to Vecchio packing up his clothes. He hadn't once looked into Stella's side of the two-door closet, which was the same side she'd always used. Hadn't opened any drawers on the girl dresser. Hadn't taken the wedding photo on the makeup table, either. Shit, even a soldier took his wife's picture to the front with him.

Narrow-eyed, Vecchio was staring back into Ray's stare. Ray loosened up his fists.

"I'm gonna set up some booby traps, Vecchio. Noisemakers. If a door opens, Fidel Castro will hear it."

"No. Let her get in here and make her try. Why scare the bitch off?"

Sounded like a plan. Ray wondered, suddenly, how much he really wanted to stop whatever Vecchio had in mind.

The Italian clicked the cylinder closed and reached for another cartridge box.

"So you're going to the mattresses," Ray said. "Big time."

Vecchio gave him the post-mob-syndrome expression. "You can take the boy out of Chicago but you can't take Chicago out of the boy."

"How about Vegas?"

"If you knew what you were talking about," Vecchio said very quietly, "you'd be a lot more careful about talking."

********

Ray was sitting straight up and he didn't know where the hell he was except that his stomach was definitely in Hell, because it was burning up without ever burning out. The floor was soft and it shifted under him like a raft on the water.

It wasn't his floor. It was an air mattress.

The last thing he'd seen, he'd been lying on his living-room floor on his left side, the very last thing he'd seen was Stella in front of him. How had he gotten from there to here? It had to be one of Victoria's little games.

Where the hell had the bitch put him? Where was the Mountie? Was Fraser in deep shit too?

His brain was too sticky to let the clues get together. He saw... night time. Pillow, linen sheets, bed that he was in on the floor, but not a real bed. Blinds with outside light coming through, desk against the far wall, door closed and light coming in under it. Wheelchair next to him. The sheets belonged at home, the wheelchair belonged to the hospital rental, the desk and window belonged in the office at the lanes. Yeah, now he got the timeline.

This was what he got for trying to sleep on his left side again. He was panting like a sprinter, his heart was trying to jerk a way out through his aching belly. He wiped his sweaty palms on his shirt, silk or not. Shit, he couldn't keep his focus. It wasn't the pain pill. It was that every second his eyes were open they kept looking around for a threat, because it had to be there. Every second his eyes were closed he saw Stella with blood behind her, with the delicate arch of her eye broken into a hole, splashed really, and her other eye pushed partway out...

He wasn't going to pass out. He made it to the file cabinet and leaned on it, one arm tight across his abdomen and the other hitting the light switch by the door. Through the dazzle he fumbled for his wallet and got out the image of his Stella as she really was. So exquisite. Ray looked at her while the adrenaline and pain sank down into places in his soul where they would stay put and do what they were supposed to, keep him alert, keep him from going soft.

Stella looked back at him from her witty blue-silver eyes. Her mouth was stubborn as always but subtly loving, because she'd known the picture was for him. She would look that way forever, only for him.

Ray kissed his wife's beautiful face and assured her, again, "Avrò sua vita."

He put the photo back in the wallet, the wallet back in the drawer, and he checked that one of the guns was there too. Panic attacks, the doctor said. Christ. It didn't have a thing to do with panic. They were revenge attacks. No, they were duty attacks. He would get his chance someday and on that day Victoria Metcalf would stop being a curse on the face of the earth.

One of the Dixie cups rasped across the floor. It was the one attached to the thread that, if you followed it long enough, was attached to the handle on the back door.

Next came a scratching noise. Stanley "Ray" Kowalski checking in. Ray scratched back twice, for back door, and quietly unlocked the office door. He crouched his way back to the bed and under the covers, stretching out slowly and painfully till he looked like he was down for the count.

Then the sound of ventilation stopped, then the faint light from the edges of the door died, then the brighter light in the gaps in the blinds was gone too, snap snap snap like that even if he couldn't actually hear the circuit breakers being switched. Ray's breathing accelerated again. God, maybe it'd all be over tonight. (And then what? He could let go after that.)

He opened the blinds to let his eyes get used to the dim streaming light coming through the rain from the corner streetlight. For a long time he didn't hear anything except time expanding to fill the available space. Kowalski might be sneaking around out there, doing his job, but he hadn't engaged the enemy yet.

Ray didn't hear the office door open but he saw the motion. He closed his eyes to a sliver, slowed his breathing, and brought his gun out to where the sights wouldn't tangle with the sheet. The door swung wide open toward him, not slowly, but no one was in the doorway. Come on, come on, Vicky, not so cautious. And Kowalski, you be a good boy and stay out of my line of fire.

Something smelled like sour milk. The heat and humidity stirred around Ray. He half rose and there was a tickle on his eyebrow. All the sight ran out of his eyes and the strength out of his muscles.

********

When Ray peered around the corner, he could just see that Vecchio's bedroom door was, shit!, open. Nobody in sight outside the room. Inside? The door slammed in his face. With that extra little clickiness that said Locked. Which he confirmed with a very careful quiet twist.

Metcalf already knew he was out there. So full speed ahead and damn the torpedo. He rose and kicked the door open, hoping for surprise or even, whoopee, knocking Metcalf on her ass. No kind of response at all, certainly no whack of door against body.

"Vecchio!" he shouted.

Nothing. Shit, he wished he had a periscope. An infrared one. Ought to be standard equipment. And if it was, he still wouldn't have it, he wasn't a cop right now.

A flashlight wouldn't hurt any either.

Ray risked a quick knee-level peek into the room. Vecchio was lying half under the sheets, half out. That couldn't be good, he should've been awake after all the racket. Nobody else in the room. Great. A locked-room mystery.

Okay, so Vecchio unlocked the door, opened it, closed it, locked it, strained his guts, passed out from the effort. No duh. No mystery.

Considering the A/C being off, there seemed like an awful lot of air motion in the room. If air was the right word for this thick Florida shit. Ray listened to instinct, close the door, dumbass. The latch of the keypad lock was broken off now, so he blocked entry with the wheelchair shoved up against the door. Nobody over here, nobody under there, nobody in the room except Vecchio. Who was breathing. Which made the piece of paper on his stomach wobble up and down.

I saw the murderer again today, August 15, at 5:07 PM outside the Fountain of Health at the Quadrangle Mall.

What was this, anyway? Stalking with intent to snitch? Where'd the noteman gone? Out the door before Ray'd gotten there? Or maybe... Ray pulled at the middle drawer of the shoulder-high metal file cabinet that was on the door end of the desk. No. It wasn't just a big box that had a false front to look like drawers. It was the real thing, full-length drawers jammed with legal-size folders. No way anybody could hide in the cabinet.

Ray returned to Vecchio's side. He moved the revolver out of Vecchio's reach, just in case, and looked the situation over. He could barely see something that looked like a couple of pieces of dark thread lying on the baldish head. It stirred up a memory. Some kind of thread like that had been stapled onto the paper plane. Whoa, touch me not. He used the sheet to brush the threads off of Sleeping Beauty.

But no wakey wakey. That could be from the pain pills sitting next to the bed, maybe, it didn't have to be weird science.

Next thing. There was this shiny streak of some kind of wet gel on Vecchio's face. What would Fraser do? Besides putting it all together and tying it up with an Inuit story, he'd lick that stuff. And, shit, didn't the idea of Fraser licking Vecchio just push all kinds of the wrong buttons?

Thinking forensics, Ray scraped the goo off onto his shooting-range membership card. Before he could get to the next step on the road to Fraserhood, which would be sniffing the stuff, Vecchio was moving like a poison lizard, hand zipping under the top of the sheet, then reaching for the floor.

"Vecchio!" Ray yelled. "Not Vegas here!"

Vecchio stared at him with more of the whites of his eyes showing than usual. Ray pointed out where he'd put the bedtime gun. The Style Pig grabbed it and sat up slowly, breathing hard, his fancy silk shirt sweaty and wrinkled.

"You all right?" Ray asked. He was up pretty close to Vecchio, made it easy to see the pure-evil look Vecchio sent out.

"Stanley, I didn't know you cared."

Ray backed away. "Somebody shut the door when I tried to come in."

"Not me." Vecchio looked shifty, like he might have slipped up. "You smell anything after the power went off? I got a whiff of something odd and then," reluctantly, "uh, maybe I went to sleep."

"There was this goo--"

The wheelchair rolled a few inches as the door opened about the same amount. There wasn't a single waste motion in the way Ray and Vecchio tipped the air mattress up on its side and crouched behind it, guns pointed at the door. Ray caught Vecchio's eye and saw him thinking the same thing. How did we get in a position where we're trying to take cover behind a big bed-shaped balloon?

Ray gestured at himself and whispered, "Door."

Vecchio nodded and mouthed, "I'll cover you."

"No, I mean," and Ray grabbed the mattress and swung it around, pushed it against the wheelchair, pressed the door closed.

Vecchio yanked him over next to the file cabinet. Thin metal and thick files full of paper was better cover than plasterboard if somebody started firing through the walls.

"Call it in?"

"They could be gone."

The door jiggled.

"Or not." Ray punched 911 on his cell and passed the story on. Dispatch said stay on the line, but Vecchio reached out and touched END.

"I'm moving on out," he said.

"Like fuck." Ray put on his glasses.

"The truth is out there."

"But you are not gonna be. You are invalid. You want your guts to pop out and glop around on the floor? Do it on somebody's else's shift."

"That whole thing's been better since I woke up. It's almost like I was never shot."

"No. I take point. You cover."

"Who're you trying to sound like there, Tarzan? Don't try to be masterful with me, Stanley, not when you got hair that looks like Cheeta's been picking fleas out of it."

Ray swore, grabbed the mattress, and shoved it at Vecchio. "Take this and use it to block the door and your mouth, too."

On hands and knees, Ray rolled the wheelchair away from the door. He left the cellphone on the floor under the desk. Let it sit there and misdirect the intruders if there was a ringback. He nodded to Vecchio, who whispered, pointing the direction, "Head for the shoe counter when you're out."

The minute Vecchio threw the mattress aside, the door swung in fast. Ray dodged back as it opened. Nobody showed in the doorway, but suddenly feet were running nearby. Ray caught Vecchio's eye and launched out to do his own dashing.

********

Ray had seen Kowalski twitch before, plenty of times, but a full-scale seizure was something new. First Kowalski jumped forward and the next thing you know he flung off to the side, banging up against the doorframe spine first. His gun hit the floor, by a miracle not firing, and slid out into the big room. With four-letter words popping out of his mouth and his eyes popping out of his head, Kowalski grabbed air in each hand but he didn't seem to have the strength to clench his hands all the way down into fists. He winced, gyrated, and threw himself against the other side of the doorframe, bouncing back before he got there as if he'd hit an invisible wall. Ray heard a little girly whimper when the bounce happened.

"What the hell, Kowalski!"

"Gotta woman!" Kowalski went on convulsing, now with his arms curved out as if he had a close-dancing partner with spasms. "Ghost woman! I can't see her! Gimme a hand!" Suddenly he jerked up one foot as if it had been stabbed.

By reflex Ray raised his gun. After thought he aimed it between Kowalski's gripping arms, figuring one was across the unseen woman's belly, the other one--well, it was placed higher up and the punk was a known horndog.

Ray yelled, "Stop moving! Both of you!"

Freeze frame.

"Vecchio, I do not need a lead supplement today," said Kowalski, scowling, contorted, wet-shirted, and breathing hard, "and she's too skinny to stop a slug, so gimme a break."

"You're sure it's a woman?"

"I am very freaking sure. Point the popgun somewhere else."

A certainty filled Ray's head, making it feel lighter than air, and he smiled what he knew was a smile the Bookman would have been proud of. Kowalski looked alarmed. Ray thumbed back the hammer and kept his aim right exactly where it was.

"Victoria," he said. "I see you've learned some new tricks."

"Look, Vecchio, I gotta good grip. She isn't gonna rabbit." It was funny, in a distant across-the-continent way, to hear Kowalski trying to look and sound patient. "I hold her, you cuff her to the desk, we body-search her. Invisible or not, she's done like a toaster biscuit. Point the gun away."

Kowalski's spiky bottle-blond head drooped forward. He sagged toward the floor, his eyes closed, sliding sideways as he went down and leaving the doorway half clear. Ray jumped to stand over the kid's body and keep up the siege. He heard tires screech on wet pavement outside, they were incoming--God, these Tampons were amateurs--and then something clammy hauled him out the door and put a lot of muscle into shoving him away. He sprawled, hearing feet running.

********

"But you didn't see anyone?" Kaufman repeated. This time of night he didn't sound chirpy at all. He smelled like perfume. Aw, too bad about his date.

"I heard sounds of running, two different times, but I didn't see anything," said Vecchio.

"Not a thing," Ray agreed with emphasis.

"But you say you fainted again. Swooned."

"Yeah, again, just like at the hospital. Just like the last time a note showed up."

"Just like the last time there wasn't any evidence anybody except you two was involved. Right, right, there was water on the floor, the back door was unlocked, and the circuit-breaker panel door was superglued closed, very suggestive pieces of proof there. Pieces of something, anyway." Kaufman waved for a blue to come over. "Vasquez, did you see anything that said somebody else was here tonight?"

"Didn't see a thing."

"Nothing? Not like, say, an artificial arm from a one-armed man?"

"Funny funny," gritted Ray. The CPD was never going to live that movie down.

"What are you gonna do about the note?" Vecchio was acting untouched, except for the way his hand stayed on his stomach. There wasn't any blood showing but he looked like he was using mental radar to figure out where his insides were.

"Evidence Control got some new file cabinets last week. Plenty of room, no standing in line, so your note will fit just fine. What it's evidence of, against who, you just have to know that remains to be seen."

Another blue came over with an evidence bag in hand. "The test printout from the office printer," she said.

"My cue to deee-part," said Kaufman with satisfaction.

"The note--"

"We're going to do cop work with it because we're the cops here. You aren't cops here, and what-eh-ver kind of cops you were back in the Windy City, anyone can plainly see it's no coincidence a-tall that you found each other."

"Words we last heard from a certain reporter," said Vecchio, raising eyebrows.

"No fucking kidding. So, Kaufman," Ray leaned in, "how much did media-boy pay you to pass him the cop gossip? Ya give out for a couple beers, maybe? Ya send all the jackets his way too?"

"Shit, you two are a real pair-o-noids. Don't try to play cops here. You hear?"

"You aren't gonna let us play in any reindeer games. Got it, Comet." Ray gave Kaufman the smile he liked to temporarily end interrogations with.

Seemed like it worked this time too. Kaufman made a throat-cut gesture and hurried for the door. Vecchio seemed to take that as a signal. He looked around kind of blankly, pivoted the wheelchair, and started to roll himself away.

Ray jumped to do the pushing.

"Men's room is over there," said Vecchio.

"Vecchio, are you--"

"Shut up."

********

"Stay out of here, Kowalski, I mean it!"

Ray leaned his weight against the door. For a wonder the punk shut up and stopped pushing.

There were eight elegant little mother-of-pearl buttons on Ray's shirt, which meant it took him forever to open it up. He was beginning to think he knew exactly what bad news he was going to find when he succeeded.

The dressings over the incisions were clean but that didn't prove anything. Ray pulled them off fast. Why not? Nothing but post-op stubble was left around there.

No injury was left either. Nothing was left. In the ugly brightness from the overhead light he could see a kind of soft crease or two that had less color than his regular tan, and the neat useless black stitches, but, shit, it was what he'd already been afraid of. Nothing but good skin anywhere. He massaged his abdomen and nothing in it burned, nothing even twinged.

A last chance. He looked in a mirror for the cut and bruise on his head that weren't there, felt for any sign of them, prodded the spot. Nothing at all. He'd come out of it without a scratch, without a sign, without as much as an ache.

He remembered Ma saying she'd light a hundred candles for him, and he wished crazily she hadn't put so much into it.

He turned his back on the mirror to get his crumpling face out of his sight. Stella, God, baby, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.

********

If Vecchio was hurting, maybe that was the best thing for everybody. Hold him down, lay him out flat, keep him away from vigilante junction which was where Ray's GPS said he was headed. Was that what the Tampa PD thought too? Maybe they'd heard the public part of The Guy Rankin Story. The part where Vecchio got a lot less damage to his fists than Rankin got to his face.

Five foot nine, the Canadian BOLO sheet said about Victoria Metcalf. Only two inches shorter than he was himself. So when Sue Storm the Invisible Girl clocked him in the face with the back of her head, why did he have a bruise way down on his lower lip? Why not a flat nose or a busted cheekbone? Metcalf didn't fit the fight.

But Vecchio'd been ready to shoot without looking. Without knowing.

Ray sat down on a hokey plastic thing like a pod motorcycle for pod people that was the seat for a, jeez, a simulator game called SuperThunderStingBike. Those little screaming target creatures in the shoot-em-up video games, that'd been him an hour or two ago. Vecchio had been about to plug him along with the Invisible Girl.

If she was Metcalf, though. She could be, the height thing was a big fat guess. Last time around, she'd been with Fraser, then she'd cleared every fingerprint and everything she brought with her out of everywhere she'd been. Invisible Girl, yeah.

If he'd thought it was her he would've... Ray put the scrimmage into instant replay and got the complete physical imagination, his hands closing tight on that woman's throat. It felt like a whole-body pulse of killer gratitude.

But. No. Shit, no. Nothing Stella hated like a woman-beater, except a rogue cop. That was good with him too. It was good even this time. He was behind that like Steve McQueen was behind a steering wheel.

So if Metcalf was invisible... What was she going to do? How was anybody going to stop her? And besides the no-see-um gimmick she had the instant-KO trick, like the Spock pinch. Except it worked by something that looked like a thread, or... maybe a wire charged up with a zap straight to the sleep nerves? Weird weird science. Of course it's weird -- Mountie Claus is coming to town. Tomorrow.

What would Fraser do? Ray had a flat stiff photo picture of Victoria Metcalf in one side of his head and a live living gorgeous picture of Benton Fraser RCMP in the other. When he put them together it made him shake. What Fraser had done for her sake last time went beyond worstness. There wasn't any word anywhere for what it would be if he did it this time.

Ray opened up his mind's eye and looked at his picture of Fraser again. No, Fraser wouldn't make the same mistake twice. (But worse?) No, Fraser had his back. Ben had his back. He had to trust that or go find a crevasse to play tag with.

********

"Hey! Wheelchair service over here!" Where had the punk gotten to? "Hey! Chauffeur!"

"Bite me, Vecchio." From the direction of the pinball machines.

Stella gone only a week, and Kowalski could dick around with the flash-bang kid stuff in the arcade. Christ.

Kowalski came around the corner and looked him over. Ray figured he was leaning himself on the doorframe in the right kind of crumpled way to be convincing, but trying to fool a detective would be a good test of his cover.

"Are ya sure ya don't need the kinda bus that has a siren?"

"Sorry to disappoint you, Stanley, just the chair. We're going to a place where we can talk without any maybe they're here, maybe they're not."

He saw the idea actually startled Kowalski. He'd had his hands all over an invisible woman but the idea still wasn't real enough to him to get him thinking implications. And this was the guy who had Fraser on the hook. Go figure.

"Do you really believe they went away for good?" Ray asked. "God, we can't be that lucky."

"They?" Said the way you say it to paranoids.

"A female for you to get lucky with," Kowalski's eyes turned hard, "and a male to shove me out of the way so she could escape from the office. That works out to 'they' in our modern English language."

Kowalski was bouncing a little bit, lightly, like boxing was about to happen. This was fine with Ray. Make it happen faster, Stanley.

"Lucky, Vecchio?"

"From where I stood it looked like you were making the most of an unusual lucky opportunity." Ray put the genuine edge of contempt into his voice. "Even though it was a woman."

The Polack knew the difference between this and the bickering they'd been doing ever since the pre-Vegas training session. He leaned in fast with his hands up and eager. Ray kept an eye on them. God but he wanted to break the punk up.

"Keep this shit up," Kowalski said roughly, "and I could be the worst luck ya ever had on the worst day of your life."

"Too late." Because it was true it slipped out before Ray could stop it. Shit. He didn't need to whine, didn't need some kind of sympathy.

The minute between words and fists stretched out longer. Then Kowalski gave him a thin biting smile, not with any of it in his eyes, whacked the palm of his hand against the wall, and strode away toward the office.

********

The access door to the machine room was too narrow for the wheelchair. Ray pushed himself up, showing the right well-remembered amount of concealed wince, unlocked the door, and switched on the light. He tapped the circle-slash-turkey sign on the outside of the door.

"You're the exception, Stanley."

Kowalski snorted and pushed past, his eyes still hard and brooding. Ray left his jacket in the chair and followed, locking the door behind them and then not bothering to lean on the wall.

"What's special about this place? They picked the lock before, ya think they couldn't be in here waiting to listen?"

"The special feature is, this corridor is twenty-eight inches wide with a locked door at each end. If you walk down it with a hand on each wall then nobody, invisible or not, is gonna be there without you knowing."

Kowalski glanced around just like there was anything to see. Plasterboard in the places between the access openings, and metal struts and framework at each of the twenty-six openings for the twenty-six pinsetter machines. Plus there were the lightbulbs and spiderwebs on the ceiling and some mouse turds on the floor.

"Classy." Kowalski started his walk.

When Kowalski was more than halfway down, Ray began his own long walk. He felt like murder warmed over, thinking about what he'd lost and the way it had all blown up into something he couldn't see the horizon of. The Victoria Effect. And because of Kowalski's big mouth, Fraser was about to get sucked into it. Yeah, sucked, just think of all the different meanings and all the kinds of grief that go along with them, especially for a cop.

Look at the cocky little shit, wearing clothes that might as well be a Kick-Me sign, swaggering along full of attitude, thinking the rules the world runs by are going to bend just for him. That was how he'd bent years of Stella's life out of shape, but he never learned a thing from it that would save Fraser any grief.

When Kowalski turned around at the far door and saw Ray coming for him, he drew himself together and prowled back out of the dead end he was about to get pinned in. Ray rolled his shoulders. God, he was ready for this, for anything that wasn't what Langoustini or Pop would do, or what the feds or the brass or the DA's office would tell him to do, but especially he was ready for this.

"Apparently I got caught in that idiopathy epidemic," he said conversationally. "That's the thing the media was mobbing the hospital about today, which is the same thing they've been howling about for months. People turning up without diseases, without cancer, with their broken bones good again, with their burns changed into good skin and their injuries all healed, maybe a hundred people all told. All getting suddenly healthy idiopathically. Like me, now."

He was only a step or two away from Kowalski now, and they'd both stopped. Come on, "Ray," you'll never get a better shot at me.

"You know that message Victoria brought me in the hospital? That was the second time. The first one showed up on my nightstand two days after she killed Stella. I threw it away. I never lost any more than a few minutes of my memory, either."

"You are so dead, Vecchio," said Kowalski, with pale back-alley eyes.

"Does that mean you want your raincheck now?" Ray braced, listening to blood pounding and the tight muscles in his neck buzzing.

"Are ya fucking crazy?"

"I'm fucking healthy, Stanley. If you wanna try to revise that, I'm your boy."

"So that's what you're after," and Kowalski sounded way too much like he was thinking about motive.

Ray's first thought was to jab and leave some marks on that half-pretty half-shaved face. Instead, he swung, a slower wider move to make himself look more like a target. Kowalski couldn't resist. He came in aiming straight for Ray's face. Good, finally, finally. Lean away just enough and shove the punk back into the wall.

Another hard jab came in. Ray ducked and took it on the top of his head. It made his brain go dark and bright, but with luck it might've caved in one of Kowalski's knuckles.

"Stanley, are you blind? The nose is over here."

For once Kowalski didn't bother with backtalk. Making like he was a pro. Sure he was. Ray threw himself in, hooking for the guts, again and again, missing more often than he'd expected, taking starry impacts on chin, eye, mouth, and cheek. Something on his face was bleeding, he saw drops fly out through the walls of the tunnel the world was turning into.

He finally slugged Kowalski hard in the belly. The guy bent and backed, his face wrinkled up the way an animal snarls -- and at the same time he was looking released, looking like he'd got a new lease on life.

"Come on come on punk! Right here! Don't you remember? I'm the one who left Stella twisting in the wind, remember? What're you gonna do--"

Ray caught a hammer blow in the middle, it hurt like hell, but nothing like the wet tearing howling burn he'd had before. He wheezed. Kowalski looked worried, lost his animal face, his stance opened up. Ray slugged him, got in close, shoved him back against the machine wall again. This time it was one of the cardboard sections, not real wall. Kowalski flung himself away from the point of impact, grimacing in a surprised kind of pain. Ray struggled with him, finally getting the advantage of having a little more height and weight, and forced Kowalski against the solid back wall, face and chest first, and got him pinned, arm twisted up. It didn't stop him struggling.

He saw Kowalski literally from a whole different angle. For the first time he thought... yeah, he couldn't guess what Stella ever saw in this shabby scrawny fox-faced punk, but he could guess what Fraser might see. Steel, and not the Victoria kind with concealed razor edges and poison on them.

Then he saw a couple of spots of blood on Kowalski's back, where the pinsetter struts had gotten him through the cardboard. Then he saw Kowalski's pale probing unyielding over-the-shoulder stare.

"We gonna fuck or what?"

"Not my style." Ray stepped back.

"Hey, lucky me!" Kowalski twisted around, still full of face-off energy. "Most people hafta go to Egypt to see de Nile. Me, I don't even need a passport."

Kowalski had to know better than that--he could've told if Ray'd had a boner.

"What you need," said Ray, wishing he had his wind back, wishing the night was over, the whole thing was over, "that's a subject I could fill the Library of Congress with."

"What I need? I need you to shut up your shit about what a fucking homo I am, once Fraser gets here. You do not pull your gaybaiting shit on him."

God, he could kill Kowalski for that. Fag-bashing was just one more of good old Pop's examples of what not to be and never to do. A real learning experience, Pop was.

"Don't fool yourself that's what this is all about," Ray told Kowalski.

"What else? Ya jealous? Ya see that old green-eyed monster in the mirror?"

Ray felt the Vegas brushed-aluminum smoothness starting to come back over him. He hated it all over again, but that didn't mean he couldn't use it whenever he needed to and lose it whenever he didn't.

He said, nicely, like it was Canada courtesy, "No, and it isn't about your style sense, or I ought to be honest and say your style non-sense, and it isn't about your punk attitudinizing. This is about you being such a dumbshit you brought Fraser down here to let the bitch kill him. Why did you do it? Did you get so needy you couldn't wait to see him?"

Body-center hit.

"Guess what? That's none of your fucking bizz." Kowalski's eyes blazed. "But I'm gonna answer it. I want him right here where I can see what happens to him and get in the way of it happening. Now, ya gonna let him alone or what? He doesn't--"

"You got it," Ray hastily said. He wasn't there to listen. "It isn't about you, Kowalski. Nothing is about you. Anything the Mountie wants the Mountie can have."

A mean grin came back at him. "Big talk. What'd you ever give him?"

This long list of a few of Ray's favorite things passed before his eyes, but it wasn't the point.

"I kept my hands to myself."

You could practically see the comic-strip light bulb above Kowalski's head. Yeah, the horndog was bound to think it was harder to play hands-off than it really was. This guy wasn't ever going to understand it but Ray was going to get it said exactly the way it was, one time in his life, even if it was Fraser's boyfriend and Stella's ex for the audience.

"Get this through your pointy head. Everything in life comes in package deals. Italian comes along with loud conversations and the nose deluxe. Being born with good hunches, that item comes along with noticing guys now and then. It's the female-intuition package. That's the whole deal and you have to take it because you can't leave it till you're underground. But it doesn't have to mean wearing eyeshadow and swishing your ass, and it definitely doesn't mean you mack on a guy and turn his life and your life and your family's life into a big scandal. You rise above it."

His voice echoed off the end of the corridor, and it sounded like a door closing somewhere. Christ but he was worn down. He'd sit, if the floor wasn't so dirty.

Kowalski was watching him the way a caretaker would. The guy's bravado had flipped end-for-end.

"Huh. I always wondered about you. And him."

What was he thinking now, Ray Vecchio had gone soft?

"I never had to wonder about you," Ray said low and coldly.

Kowalski ignored that.

"That was why ya went to Vegas?"

Ray ignored that. He said, "You find some way to deal with this that doesn't fuck up Benny's life. If you ruin him I'll neuter you."

"You're full of big talk tonight." Kowalski looked thoughtful a moment.

"It's the right time and the right place to clear the air. You never know what's gonna happen tomorrow."

"Whaddaya think, Metcalf is going to finish you off?"

"You don't know the bitch like I do. Every knife she twists has another knife waiting right behind it."

Kowalski was watching him that way again.

"Vecchio, ya really think the Invisible Woman is gonna be able to beat the Three Musketeers? Gotta be low blood sugar. Candy machine. Now."

"That's your idea of a game plan?" Ray followed the Polack back to the door.

"First, sugar high. Then, game plan."

********

"Vecchio. I'm sorry for your troubles." Welsh said it gravely.

"I appreciate that, Lieutenant."

"Your wife was always a bulldog in the courtroom. She'll be missed here."

"I wish she could've heard you say that," Ray said, controlling his breathing, feeling the pride on top of the grief.

"So what's the purpose of this call?"

"I got a couple of things going on here. Kowalski came down and we've been talking--"

"I'd never have guessed," Welsh said drily.

"We got a theory--"

"One the Tampa PD doesn't sympathize with, I take it."

"That's the issue of the day for me, Lieutenant. You know the rep I was supposed to have when I went down to Tampa? The job's shut down but I've been hearing some things from the local PD that sound like nobody's corrected the record. Unless you've heard different?"

A pause. "I haven't heard of any updates."

"Neither have the Tampa boys in blue. That makes life less than easy here, you know, but there's another little twist that involves a certain material of which nine supposedly went missing. My 'rabbis,'" he said it scornfully, "they told me back in March they were going to put that particular item in the precinct files before I got to Dixie. Kowalski told me it was already in there before he'd been on the job a week. Not five months ago. More than a year ago."

"Kowalski's telling you straight."

"And I'm telling you straight that I didn't do it."

"We're all aware of that, Vecchio." The putting-him-in-his-place voice had never been welcome till now. Ray wiped his eyes and pushed his silk sleeves back to keep from spotting them.

There was some silence, and then Welsh said, "I was also aware that your 'rabbis' put you under a lot of pressure to be recruited. You think they arranged more pressure than you were aware of at the time?"

"Like they set up the niner to get me under their thumbs, make me take the job. It turned out they didn't need it because of the business with Guy Rankin -- they could leverage me with that instead. But what do you think, they'd waste a good fix? They kept it in place and used it for this job."

"I can check into it."

"Thanks but no, it's old news now. We need to get somewhere with this theory of ours about Victoria Metcalf. Somebody with contacts would be a big help, since Tampa isn't cooperating. But it could be somebody in the Chicago DA's office."

Remind Welsh he hadn't protected one of his men from the feebs. Remind him his buddy Kowalski was in on this theory. Remind him Stella's old crowd would score for giving an assist, if Welsh didn't. The Lieu was sure to notice he was being worked... but that might not keep an old good cop from taking a chance. It might even make him think it was a good chance.

"I'm sorry to say your technique for asking favors has improved, Vecchio. Against my better judgment I ask the question -- what are you after?"

Ray leaned back and tried to rub the smoothness off his face. "Bringing a badge back from the dead."

********

Ray picked his face up out of his hands, which he dried off on his teeshirt. As he finished wiping his face off the same way, one of the short-term residents stalked by and he got a blurred eyeful of blue bird tail.

Why did they put peacocks in a cemetery? To keep distracting you? Maybe so, 'cause it would be kind of an insult to the dead if grieving got to be just a wrapped-up-in-yourself self-perpetrating habit.

Ray laid a palm lightly on the back of the temporary marker. His hand jumped back. The thing might be plastic but it felt as real as stone.

August 3, 1964 to August 8, 1998.

Hidden back behind the worse-for-weather flower arrangements, something attached to the marker, a card sealed in a plastic envelope. Ray peeked through a gap in the lilies. A hand-sketch of a ten-pointed star, luce della mia vita per sempre. Huh. Like Italian was their own private Vecchio marriage language or something. Familiar handwriting. 10 keys. 1 key.

He put the fancy glass beads from his Chicago layover in the grass below the marker. One string for each of the colors in a rainbow, every bead with a pattern like a flower garden, plus a dozen pearls that looked like swollen gold coins and one big sloppy-shaped oval bead made from some other kind of glass that had a color-shifting shine like a classy oil slick. That was the kind of pretty she liked in the old days, the kind she could look at any time she felt like it, forever. Not like these flower arrangements from Vecchio and the families.

Leave Stella a present from the old days because? Old days and new were all the same place once you were dead.

"Ray, it isn't that I don't appreciate the thought. But didn't you think, someone might steal them?"

Like nobody ever steals flowers?

"The beads are small and easy to conceal and they can be sold on E-Bay, unlike flowers."

They don't turn into garbage after a week. Unlike flowers.

"It's a little like encouraging criminal behavior, don't you think?"

No, he didn't think.

Shit, he had a phantom Stella too, not just a phantom Mountie.

He left the beads there. Stubborn was the only way for him. It wasn't like she wasn't.

Ray wished she could've just let it be.

"Sorry, Stell, but it's true. I mean it. Why'd you go into the house after he told you to drive away? Were you trying to show him he couldn't give you orders? You shoulda left it to the cops. It was a kinda dumb thing to do."

He plucked the tops off a clump of grass that was messing up the way the pink beads lay, then tucked the dead blades behind the marker, out of sight.

"Shit. Listen to me suck. It was a brave thing to do. I bet you no other Gold Coast girl would ever have the stones to do that."

Stella trapped by Ellery in the bank. The way her eyes went a little wild hadn't been all fright, she'd been waiting to take her best shot. Like always.

Here he was in the middle of deja vu all over again. Gravestones all around him. Over there, one of those weird little carved marble buildings. It was like that day in the cemetery with Fraser and Ellery was one parenthesis and, look, here was the other one to match. End of an era.

"I'm gonna take care of Fraser first. Take care of Ben. Yeah, ya heard me." Nobody to fight with here, nothing to see here, move on, but he was ready to fight anyway. "Yeah, that's right. That's how things are now. Stell, I'm gonna make sure Metcalf goes down, down, down. But Fraser comes first."

After a minute he rearranged the flowers to pack them up against each other better, leave fewer gaps.

"I know you'd want me to take care of Vecchio the way I came down here to do for you, but shit, the only kinda help he needs is for me to lock him in one of his bowling-ball lockers so he stays outa trouble. He wants to play vigilante. You hate that shit as much as I do."

If it was him instead of Vecchio, what would he be doing? He'd had some pretty bad-cop ideas about Marcus Ellery.

Ray sighed. He draped the strings of beads in random curves so they weren't all regular and boring. "Hell. It coulda been me. I'll do what I can."

He'd committed to the job for real now, and it was like his brain gave him a reward for it. Now his memories came out of storage, and they were all the good ones, all the ones that didn't need words. Stella talking to him using the deep light in her bright eyes, the lift of her chin, the wicked little smirk when he drove fast, the softness and slide and wrap-around of her body when they drove each other. When was the last time it was all that good?

It was good right now. Was that freaked up?

No. Call it a sign of general unfreakedupness. Leave now, leave while they were on a high note. What she'd wanted from him.

But it was never what he wanted.

********

"Aside from the charitable bequests, in other words Ms. Kowalski's wardrobe, and aside from the bequest of a number of specified items of jewelry to members of her family, the remainder of her estate passes to you. The amount--"

"Forget about that for now, tell me some other time. Whatever it is, it is." Ray rubbed his eyes. "Change my will so my estate includes whatever's coming to me, and change the percentage that was gonna go to my wife so it goes to the trust for my mother and sisters."

"And the percentage that's designated for the Fraternal Order of Police, Chicago Lodge 7?"

"Keep it the same."

"And the fixed-dollar-value bequest to Benton Robert Fraser?"

"No change."

Ray thought, when Fraser gets that money he's going to kill me for leaving him as much as I did. It isn't like he needs it, Jesus, you can never overestimate how much the Mountie doesn't need.

********

For personal, professional, and practical reasons Fraser would have preferred the red serge uniform. Red certainly would have been easier than brown for Ray to recognise in the airport throng. But in the absence of liaison duties, with their ceremonial overtones, he couldn't very well pursue his preference.

He donned the Stetson and took himself out of the gate area and into the main corridor. He saw no one he recognised. Concern was premature, though.

Ray's home phone was disconnected, but the bowling alley line was busy. Ray's cellphone answered after four rings, but the answer was silence.

"Ray?"

Fraser heard a gasp, quite possibly one of pain. The skin on his spine tightened. He dropped his voice to a whisper.

"Ray. If you're being threatened or held captive in any way, address me as 'Frase' in your next response. If you are not--"

"Fraser!"

"--then call me 'Fraser.'"

"Fraser!" Ray's manner wasn't reassuring.

"That could have been a meaningless response, Ray. Could you--"

"Fraser comma Benton Robert Constable, I am not under duress, do you read me?" Ray sniffed once, hard.

"But are you--"

"I am alone here. I am absofreakinlutely alone." Another sniff.

A voice shrieked hauntingly on the other end of the phone. Fraser's first thought was ban sidhe, which was patently ludicrous but still chilling. Then he recognised the cry: Pavo cristatus. He realised where Ray must be.

"No, Ray," he said gently. "You aren't alone."

"I know. Yeah. Okay. I know that, Ben," Ray said, hoarse-voiced. "I'm sorry, I lost track of the time. You're still at the airport, right?"

"Yes, Ray." Fraser bit the proverbial bullet. "If it wouldn't be a gross intrusion, I'd like to... pay my respects to her before we leave Tampa."

Muffled, Ray said, "That's good with me, Ben."

With sympathy, and with a startling pulse of passion that he forcefully set aside for a better moment, Fraser pictured Ray's sharp, heart-shaped face... eyes veiled with grief. His own eyelids stung.

"You stay right there in the airport," Ray said urgently. "Near the gate, inside the terminal, off the street. Stay where people can see ya, lotsa public people. I'm coming out for ya now. Hey. Didya bring Dief?"

"I didn't feel it would be 'buddies' to do that, considering the triple threat. Quarantine, the Florida summer climate, and... of course, Victoria Metcalf." Fraser rubbed his eyebrow and felt the pressure loosen his suddenly tense facial muscles. "He's with Maggie."

"Shit. We gotta case of weird tales here. We could really use his -- oops, forgot about the deaf part, but his nose'd be even a better good thing. As of last night we got one or two more suspects, parties unknown, and they're both invisible."

"Ah. My ears must still be plugged from the flight. Would you repeat that, please?"

********

Ray's arrival wasn't delayed for long. After a quick glance around the mostly oblivious crowd, though that precaution would be no protection against invisible assailants, should they exist, Fraser asked the most obvious question.

"I had a bad night with a pinsetting machine," said Ray. "Not something you want to meet in a dark alley." Ray's demeanour was at once guarded and manic, and he hadn't yet lifted his hands (whose knuckles were swollen and abraded) from Fraser's shoulders.

Really, sorrow might take any number of forms, and Fraser was aware of contention between Ray and Ray that must only have been exacerbated by the death of their wife and ex-wife, but this surely couldn't have been strictly necessary to the grieving process. He took Ray up on his absurd prevarication.

"I wasn't aware those devices had the same dimensions as the human fist. The pattern of contusions on your face--"

"Real modern robot kind of machine, Frase. All under control now." Ray gave him a slantwise grin that was part mind-your-beeswax and part what? "Winner-take-all" came to mind somehow.

Fraser licked his lips involuntarily, dragged his gaze away from that smile, reminded himself of the need for vigilance, and scanned the concourse crowd for threats.

"Yeah," said Ray, taking his hands away. "Lotsa people, lotsa eyes. It isn't Canada here, is it? About as far from Tuktoyupchuck as you can get."

Evidently he had misinterpreted Fraser's concern.

"You may not be aware, Ray, that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have a mission statement." Fraser cupped his hands over Ray's hard shoulders.

"Like what?" Ray's eyes glinted.

"We commit ourselves to preserve the peace, uphold the law, provide quality service in partnership with our communities, and carry and maintain a little piece of Canada wherever we go, no matter how benighted--"

Ray grinned brilliantly and embraced him. Fraser said oof and held his partner close, urgently. It was not unlike holding a live wire whose insulation wasn't quite intact. He felt... sizzled, and when he and Ray released each other he was tingling.

He had brought clothing and supplies for an indefinite stay. The luggage, or rather the choice of who should carry it, was a bone of contention. Fraser seized the handles first, but Ray evidently was awaiting his next chance.

"Tell you the plan," Ray said as they walked into the already-established heat and humidity of the parking lot. "I'm on the street today checking places where the invisi-snitch said Metcalf had been. You stick with Vecchio at the bowling alley -- he's making some calls -- we'll get together this evening."

"In other words, you're to be the bait." Fraser rubbed his eyebrow. "As I suppose Ray is right now."

Ray shot him a sun-gilded look. "Frase, that is so far from right it isn't even left."

"Any one of us, alone, is a target."

"Metcalf wouldn't know me from Kerry Wood."

"Your baseball record isn't relevant." He saw Ray's mouth drop open as if the statement had been unreasonable. "Clearly she studied Ray's home defence system. Therefore she must be considered capable of surveillance, of recognizing your association with Ray, and of linking you with me." He added, with difficulty, "Take her seriously as a threat, Ray. She... told me I never should have introduced her to my friends."

Ray scowled, and kicked at a tire of one of the parked cars they were passing.

"Ya remember everything she ever said to ya word for word?"

"It isn't a great challenge."

Ray stalked ahead of him, long-legged, lithe, and irate, eying all of his surroundings except Fraser. Occasionally it was difficult to tell whether he was angry at himself, or Fraser, or the world, or all three. This was not such a moment. Ray had every right to be outraged at hearing his partner quote his ex-wife's murderess with such fidelity.

It was Ray's own good-hearted doing, ironically. The idea of talking about his time with Victoria to any other human person, much less quoting her, was not supportable. But Ray... Fraser needed his understanding, if only it were possible. 'To understand all is to forgive all.'

When they reached the rental car Fraser automatically memorised its plate number, model, and year. Still silent and stiff-shouldered, Ray unlocked the doors, though only after unscrewing the radio antenna and placing it on the back seat. Fraser entered, sat, latched his protective harness, and finally brought himself to look at Ray.

Who immediately faced away.

"Ray. Ray..."

Ray turned back. His expression swept through refusal, dismay, demand, apprehension, concern, and finally an echo of sorrow.

"Frase... Ben. I get why you didn't want to talk to me about Stella. I get it completely. I have my grief, you have yours. So it doesn't matter what anybody says here, it's gonna hang the pain out on the line. For you, it's gotta be kinda like Victoria Metcalf is dead. 'Cause now you know she never turned herself around after she left you. Anything good you had with her, never again. See?"

"Never again? Never at all, in reality." Fraser was stunned at Ray's generosity, and unable to refrain from expressing a bitterness that felt ancient.

Ray sighed, perhaps in relief.

"Is it... can I talk to you about her, Ben?"

Fraser closed his eyes, leaned his head back against the seat, and dreaded his own intractable, ingenious resistance to laying himself open in the way that came so naturally to Ray.

"Yes. We can talk about her at some point. If you'll listen." He opened his eyes again and looked sidelong at his partner.

"See any earplugs here? Do ya?" Ray cocked his spiky blond head at several angles to give Fraser a clear view of the exterior pinnae. "Maybe they're the invisible model?"

"Ray. It's difficult."

"That's the thing," Ray said, gripping the steering wheel and shaking it. "The thing. What scares me is, is the, the, what's it called, the signal to noise ratio? Is Metcalf on a different frequency than we are?" His limber beautiful hands drew lines back and forth in the air between himself and Fraser as if outlining an electromagnetic field. "Or is it the same, and she drowns us out?" His hands jittered like static, all knuckles. "I don't mean you'd leave," he added desperately, "but more like you'd be here but not here. But I don't mean permanently like that."

Fraser reached for Ray's hands. "I'll do everything in my power, Ray, to prevent any kind of... distance from separating us. Literally or figuratively, whether she's at cause or not."

"Okay. Good. That's good. Ben." Ray's eyes were shade-blue now. The tropic sunlight cut across his chin at a slant. He said suddenly, "Hey, I gotta get the AC on. You're all over sweat, Arctic boy."

He gripped Fraser's hands briefly and turned to start the car.

Halfway to the parking lot exit, Ray asked, "So are we gonna be carting Vecchio around with us today?"

Fraser looked up from the Tampa street map he'd been using to focus his mind. "I think that would be wisest."

"That settles it. I turn left."

Two blocks after the left turn Ray swung the car into a parking lot, then aligned it neatly in a queue of vehicles.

"In the name of all that's good, Ray, why are we at a car wash?"

"Why, the man asks? There's soap, there's foam, there's blasts of air and jets of water," Ray gave him a smile that would have been shy if it hadn't been strained, "and it's all in a big noisy tunnel, Frase, it's privacy American style like a little tent in a howling blizzard in the Northwest Areas is privacy Canadian style. Ya owe me something if I'm going to be cooped up with Vecchio all day."

"Nothing could be better," Fraser said heartily.

But, dear God, he was ambivalent. Victoria was in this city. Her presence, her almost certain intention, his own frighteningly similar drive for retribution, made the air sticky with sordidness and threat. Ray's still-loved ex-wife was murdered, the very fact Ray had just been mourning. Fraser wore the responsibility for that like a second skin. He simply wasn't clean enough to touch Ray.

On the other hand... Ray had chosen a venue that, at the risk of hyperbole, could be seen as a place of purification. Sometimes Fraser wondered at the rather odd wisdom possessed by the poet his partner said was inside him.

"You amaze me," Fraser said suddenly, surprising himself as well as Ray.

Ray looked at him, and kept looking, and stopped moving, and then every feeling in Ray's heart was on his face. It left Fraser dazzled and rapt; nothing like Victoria was even thinkable. Guilt and distance were unthinkable too.

The car wash attendant tapped the window.

Quickly, almost gasping, Ray said, "Whatever crazy thing you were thinking, Ben, keep thinking it," and rolled down his window.

They became wordless. Fraser was very sure that Ray, who seemed so distant and still across the front seat, felt the same awareness he did. The vehicle ahead of them was caught by the traction device and drawn into the windowless tunnel. His Ray looked at him and didn't look away as his hands and feet automatically coaxed the car toward the vortices of bristles and cloth ribbons and the gouts of thick white foam.

To tune the tension between them, not to slacken it, Fraser said innocently, "Actually, Ray, this bears very little resemblance to a blizzard, howl though it may. The local climate is much too warm for verisimilitude."

Ray's mouth curved in a wildly seductive way. He said, "I don't remember that tent being cold, Ben."

"Nor do I."

Foam sluiced down over the windows. Ben slid and leaned leftward to Ray. The stick of the gearshift, an obstacle, made an aching notch in his thigh next to where Ray's blood-warm hand was suddenly gripping. The instant spectrum of shades of heat and wet and closeness was delightful...

the trace of sharp damp salt his tongue found near the corner of Ray's eye;

Ray's calloused hand sliding in sweat under his uniform shirt;

accelerating warm moist breath in his ear;

the incredible savour of Ray's neck;

of Ray's lips, tongue, palate...

The whole car shook.

Ray pulled himself away, gasping, but determinedly pushing Ben back to the right.

"Down, Ben." He chuckled, or growled. "Leaving the Tunnel of Love now. Too freaking bad."

The veil on the windshield was a thin roil of hard-driven water, not a layer of safely opaque foam. Daylight was all too visible ahead.

"Moderation might have been wiser," Fraser managed, positioning the Stetson over the rise in his lap.

"I'll wait for wise till I'm in a box underground."

A very Ray reaction to mortality.

"Far be that day," Fraser said from the heart.

"I'll take a double order of that with double-sauce." Ray's eyes were humourous. "Quick, lemme have the map." He spread it over himself, improving the otherwise undistinguished contours of Florida's topography.

Then he gave Fraser an all-encompassing look, a mercilessly randy stare.

"It's a good thing Canadians make such big hats."

Fraser didn't quite choke. He straightened his face as well as he could, considering the various strains under which he was operating.

"But, Ray," he said in his best eternal-naïf style, "my hat is a great deal smaller than your map."

As hoped, Ray's reaction was gratifying.

********

The bowling alley echoed as they walked past the snack bar, coin-operated massage chairs, automated sphygmomanometers, gumball and claw machines, and pull-tab-game dispensers, all as carefully situated as so many bear traps. Ray Vecchio wasn't in his office. Fraser cast Ray a questioning look.

"Don't worry about it, Frase. His car is here, he's safe."

No doubt that was the case. Nonetheless Fraser no longer felt the sensual, conspiratorial glow with which he had left the car wash. The warmth had gone.

"Did you preserve any of that sleep-inducing gel?"

"Nah, Kaufman took the whole gob, but I still got the paper I scraped it onto. Wanna taste, big boy?"

"I will, thank you kindly." He tasted the card first with tongue-tip, then touched it to the taste-buds near the centre of his tongue. Ray was shaking his head violently and turning his thumbs down. The expected reaction. "Passiflora edulis. Ipomoea alba. Lavendula, the Provence cross. And sour milk. None of those should produce a soporific effect, although lavendula can be a calmative when used in a massage oil."

"Being calm is a total waste of a good massage."

The floor was carpeted; there was no point looking for traces there. The top of the oak desk was coated with fingerprint powder. It obscured the marks Fraser had expected to find, scuffs from shoe soles, but he could see suggestions of their presence.

"Ray, you must have trapped your intruders in here when you entered. They climbed onto the desk," Fraser did the same, careful to touch as little of the desktop as possible, "and one seems to have crouched on top of the file cabinet. The soles of the shoes are... not an unusual pattern, unfortunately. They were hiding up there all the time you were in the room."

"Until the woman knocked into me."

"A woman, but perhaps not the woman. We don't know there was only one."

"We don't know lotsa things, like are they here right now. That reminds me. I know where Vecchio must be hiding out. See back there at the end of the ball lockers..."

********

A phone extension cord ran beneath what Ray had called "the turkey door." Before Fraser reached for the knob he was stopped cold by the wheelchair just outside the door. It smelled of pain. Fraser pinched the bridge of his nose and guilt settled on him again.

It was arrogance to think he carried all the responsibility for all of Victoria's crimes. It was faint-heartedness to delay in taking what reproaches he did deserve.

But he might be interrupting his best friend's grieving now, as he'd interrupted his lover's earlier.

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring. Comforter, where, where is your comforting?

Intolerable.

Fraser cracked his neck, and knocked. "Ray?"

"Benny? It's not locked."

He found Ray Vecchio sitting on a crate in an unpleasantly cramped, ill-lit corridor that was reminiscent of the supply closet. The ecchymoses on Ray's face and brow, the split lip and swollen ear, were not unexpected.

Ray turned off a device that was making a noise like angry static electricity, gestured for him to close the door, and stood and opened his arms. Fraser closed his eyes and held his friend. Not the first time he'd hugged and been hugged by Ray and, he hoped, not the last.

"Benny, it's good to see you."

"As it is for me, Ray."

"I wish I wasn't seeing you." Ray's eyes were inflamed, weary, and loving.

Fraser smiled. "I'm sure you would have shielded me from her if you could." He hoped his very real fondness and forgiveness were perceptible.

"Yeah. Well." Ray didn't look away, but briefly his face settled into an unblinking mask. "You know you're welcome to stay here. I can put a spare mattress on the floor so you feel at home but, sorry, I can't provide the bedbugs and Mr. Mustafi."

"Thank you kindly, Ray. But I'm afraid I'm obligated to stay at the hotel tonight, since it's too late to obtain a refund on this night's reservation. I don't want to impose an unnecessary expense on the Dominion."

Ray shook his head and clapped Fraser on the shoulder.

"I'll pay for the hotel room. You and S-- Kowalski stay here where it's safe. I wasn't kidding about bringing in an air mattress."

Mattress. Singular. And Ray had held him close, ungrudgingly, though he knew.

"You're aware, then, that Ray and I..."

Ray smiled, to a certain extent. "It's written all over your face. You know, with your complexion, Kowalski better shave if he wants to maintain your cover." The mask came back. It passed away more slowly this time.

"A number of people have already guessed, I'm sure."

"That's a shame, Benny," Ray's voice grew louder, "and if I was a praying man I'd pray you never find out what a big shame it can be."

"Ray is incapable of doing anything that could shame me." Fraser wasn't sure what in his voice made Ray flinch but, admittedly, it was the reaction he'd wanted.

"Okay, like you say, he wouldn't," Ray said, his expression resolute. "You wouldn't. The two of you together wouldn't either except, would you believe it, you aren't the only two people in the world. Half the world is gonna want to go into business to shame you. Christ, Benny!"

"We recognise the risk. It isn't insurmountable."

"Stubborn Mountie." Ray's head dropped. "Stubborn mentally-deficient martyr Mountie."

In better days Ray Vecchio had urged him to stick up for himself, and sometimes he'd implied Fraser's plans were gratuitously risky, or more than implied it, but he'd never gone so far as to make accusations of willful martyrdom. Ready to remonstrate, Fraser opened his mouth; the larger aperture allowed him a fresh burst of olfactory acuity; his attention was caught by the smell of Ray's exhaustion under his cologne. Even while sympathy rose up in Fraser he catalogued the scent. Strong on lavender and jasmine, the type of cologne advertised as appealing to women, and not as resinous an odour as had been Ray's wont. A gift from Stella, almost certainly.

Fraser thought of Ray's advice about the necessity of presuming and hoped it would apply equally well to his other Ray.

He asked, "How are you doing?"

"I have a scar I could hide under a piece of sewing thread. That's all I have left." Ray didn't look relieved. "This kinda slam-dunk healing has been going around a lot."

Fraser noted that.

"Do I understand correctly that you're actually fine and fit?" It was difficult to credit. He knew his gunshot injuries.

Ray slapped himself on the abdomen and smiled at him mordantly. "Not that I'm letting it show in public, you understand. I'm playing to my strengths, Fraser. You know, always help the enemy underestimate you."

There was a shadowy change in Ray's face. Fraser responded to that more than to the words.

"Am I an enemy, Ray?"

"Aw, don't take that wrong, Benny." Ray looked distressed. Immediately he seemed more familiar.

"I'm very sorry about Stella."

"I never thought different."

Fraser braced his feet apart, hands behind his back.

"I could have prevented her death by taking Victoria into custody."

"I could've kept it from happening a week ago if I'd've faked being out cold and waited my chance to shoot her when she came out of the hall. Or I could've stopped it back in Chicago, if I'd managed to shoot her instead of you."

Fraser looked Ray hard in the eyes. "The real responsibility was mine."

"Everybody comes to a point where he wants to throw everything away for one person," Ray said tiredly. "It's the kinda thing you see in fairy tales, but it happens to everybody someday. You couldn't've done anything but what you did, Benny. You wouldn't've done anything like that for anyone but her."

"True enough." Fraser was surer of that now than he had been for years. Three years.

His friend sighed and looked down, and ran a hand over his cropped head.

"You aren't the one to blame here. She broke your heart, she's broken mine too." Now Ray's eyes were an unfathomable mixture of fierceness and fondness. He said, "You know, I told her in Chicago, in my own home, Fraser, that if she hurt you I would kill her. And for what she did to Stella, that's... yeah. I know you really don't want me to talk about that."

Fraser looked at Ray's expression and felt himself go on alert. It was like living in the low latitudes for years, associating the tropic ocean waters only with warmth, the buoying up of one's body, and a propensity to tempest. And then, one day, being compelled to realise: "Here there be sharks."

********

It was like deja-Vegas all over again, except the bowling alley office was a lot smaller and shabbier than the Bookman's. Armando wouldn't have sneezed on it even to throw it away afterwards. The counter-surveillance technology was the same, though, concept courtesy of the Iguana family. An audio jammer to screw anyone who was trying to listen in, plus encrypted short-range broadcast headsets to let the players talk across the jamming noise. The fibbies had hated that, so Victoria and her invisible playmate would too.

"Ray. Ray." Benny turned away from the desk, adjusting his headset mike again.

Even through the distortion from cryption and the steroid-overdosed crackling sounds, Ray could tell which 'Ray' was which. Kowalski got this extra-bright kind of tone, like a grade-school teacher calling on the kid who was in a sugar daze. Himself, he got the steady way of saying the name because Benny was talking to someone who was on the ball.

"Ray?" Fraser was looking him over. "Are your earphones working?"

"Ready whenever you are, Benny."

"We have three sequences of events to reconcile." Fraser pointed at his lecture notes.

"Three?" There were only two rows of sticky-notes on the desktop.

"First, the Victoria Metcalf timeline." Benny's voice was flat in a way that didn't make it sound more professional. "February 1995 -- she was released from prison, where she'd had minimum-security privileges for some time. March -- her sister Alix died in a single-car accident. April. Victoria... left Chicago after shooting Jolly Hughes and Diefenbaker. We know nothing about her actions from then till recently." Of course Benny had made a neat little gap in the neat little line of notes to show the missing time. "Late June, July sixteenth, and August fifteenth -- she was seen at three different health-related facilities in Tampa."

"Yeah, so somebody says." Kowalski stopped running his fingers over his headset, took the marker pen out of Benny's hand, and scrawled question marks on three of the notes.

"If you'd be so kind." Benny held out his hand.

"It's nice to be nice to the nice," said Kowalski, smirking and returning the pen.

Christ, they were flirting with each other. Ray was going to put up with that if it killed him because it was up to him to be a good friend, not to mention a good loser and a good host. At least Kowalski was a decent cop and he had a big fat incentive to keep Fraser clear of Victoria. You couldn't really hope for much better in this life.

Both of them were looking him over now. What was that about?

"She gave away some free clues about those three years, for what free is worth," Ray said. "She said we had to pay for the things she had to do to get her money back, like they were things she hadn't wanted to do. Ask yourself, what could there possibly be she wouldn't be willing to do to get half a mil? She was dressed like a rich woman, the cloth and the cut and the drape -- I know what kind of haute couture costs so much that nobody I knew in Chicago could afford it except Frankie Zuko's wife. Another thing, she had long sleeves in Florida in August. That means her arms can tell secrets."

"Junkie?" said Kowalski. He said it guiltily to Fraser, but last night when he and Ray were brainstorming he'd said it guilt-free. "Doesn't fit. They bleed money, they don't save it. Working girls don't get rich either."

"She was wearing gloves," Ray threw in. "Hello, does that make sense? It's not like she wore a mask or tried to hide the way she diddled my security system. No, she wasn't worried about being recognized or leaving prints, she was hiding her hands."

"A ring, right? Or the mark from one. She has dollars by marriage."

"Black Widow," concluded Ray.

"Supposing she's married, she might not find it necessary to kill a husband if his survival gave her better access to his resources," said Fraser neutrally.

"She might not find it necessary." Ray made it sarcastic.

Fraser didn't flinch, not even at the corners of his eyes. He tilted his chin up and pointed at the other row of stickies. "I'll come to that in discussing our own personal time line."

"She didn't find it necessary to kill you, Vecchio," Kowalski said.

"That's only because--" Ray stopped.

"She wouldn't have been satisfied to kill him without first ruining him, Ray."

Christ, Benny really had lost his innocence. Was that such a good thing even if it meant he was free of Victoria? Was that the kind of good Kowalski had done him?

But the Polack had scored a point a minute ago. Ray rethought some recent history. Why hadn't Vicky shot him dead? Fraser would have come down here just as fast for a dead Italian as a live one, maybe faster. Ray hadn't had to be alive, he hadn't had to get any mystery letter. You could even argue the bitch would have had a better chance to wipe Fraser out if he hadn't been warned about her. What the hell was going on here?

Shit. He shouldn't have been tuning out. Fraser was talking about timelines again. Ray knew his Mountie -- he knew he'd have slim, zero, and anti chance of being ahead of Fraser when he needed to be if he didn't work to keep up every minute.

"What's that prove?" asked Kowalski.

"Consider her methods." Fraser's eyes glinted. "Within about two months after leaving prison she was fully prepared to make her first attack on us, complex though it was. But after her escape from justice in Chicago three years went by during which she was apparently free to act against one or both of us, but didn't. Then, only four months after Ray came here, she attacked again."

"She could've been in prison for something else till a couple of months ago," Ray hazarded.

"How'd she get high-fashion rich then?" Kowalski challenged him.

"Look, peanut gallery, you're supposed to be keeping an eye on the popcorn." Ray was happy to sacrifice some of his snack-bar inventory for early warning against approaching invisibles -- it was a hell of a lot cheaper than the rental on the high-tech counter-surveillance gear -- but wasting it was another matter.

Kowalski looked out the office door and made a circus-clown act out of peering around. "No footprints, just virgin crunchy white crap as far as the eye can see. Hey, Frase, is that enough like a blizzard for ya?"

Fraser cleared his throat civilly. "Purely hypothetically, she married a wealthy man who lives in Florida or, more safely for her, on some Caribbean island not governed by the States. Her husband is alive and for some reason she can't leave him for long enough to travel far."

"He's sick."

"He's dying," Kowalski bounced a little, "and if she stays away too long she loses her chance to glom onto property that's not in his will."

"Or he places unusually tight restrictions on his wife's movements."

"Mob." Ray knew the type.

"Freelance smuggler. " Kowalski pointed two fingers defiantly at Ray.

"Or a man in a highly visible position with ongoing public social obligations."

"Hold on hold on, Frase. Say she had obligations and like that, say she hadta spend all her time handing out public service awards at the opera, would that stop her from hiring a hitter?"

"She may make others take her risks," said Fraser grimly, "but she takes her revenges herself."

Kowalski said, "Fuck!" under his breath and kicked the doorframe like a rabid little kid. He dinged it. If he'd been drafted for undercover in Vegas instead of the two-seven, he'd've had to learn some impulse control or die.

Ray hadn't died.

He said, "Explain to me how marrying money must have ruined her life." He found he was talking from back behind the smoothness. It was automatic. "Tell me what made the bitch want revenge for being rich."

Kowalski shot him a double-barreled scattergun blast of a look. Ray read it as one barrel protective anger for Fraser's sake and one barrel angry agreement for Stella's sake. Fraser didn't hand out any kind of look at all, he just pulled at his collar guiltily. The careful arrangement of his face made Ray feel greasy under the skin with shame.

"Speculating further could lead us astray. Ray, would you be so kind as to bring Google up ?"

Fraser's fingers on the keyboard blurred like the pictures on a spinning slot-machine reel. Idiopathic Tampa, was what Ray saw in the search slot. What the hell? He protested about Fraser wasting time, going off on a tangent. Kowalski said a lot of the same kind of thing except louder and a lot less coherent. Fraser responded politely without explaining much of anything except the mathematical definition of a tangent. He went on flipping through search pages and writing more sticky notes.

That was Benny for you. Whatever wild idea he was tracking down, he wouldn't ever tell you the full ins and outs of it till he had Proof. He didn't want to look like he was grandstanding. Or in this case, in this one very particular case, maybe it was because he didn't want to give Ray a chance to get ahead of him.

"The third timeline is this." Fraser laid out another row of stickies with all their edges lined up as if a nun had laid down her ruler for him to use.

What with the stickum on the notes and the leftover print powder, the fine finish on the oak desktop had to be suffering. Good wood deserved better treatment than that. Ray decided it wasn't worth complaining, though. There was damn little that was worth bitching about anymore, when you came right down to it. And how much longer was he going to be the owner of that desk, anyway?

He caught Fraser watching him that way again.

"This better be good," said Kowalski, scowling at Fraser.

"I concur."

"Cause the Sun is going around the Earth at the rate of one minute per minute, Frase, daylight is short."

Ray could hear the astronomy lecture already; he saw the Mountie's eyes gleam innocently and his mouth begin to open. Then Fraser's eyes dropped and he thumbed his eyebrow.

"Briefly, then. February nineteenth, 1998. At St. Joseph's Hospital, a paramedic who had been thrown out a third-story window and sustained a broken back and numerous splintered bones awoke in the morning to find himself completely healed. No one had been seen entering the ICU. May fourteenth, at Tampa General a firefighter who had been admitted with third-degree burns over forty percent of his body was healed with equal thoroughness, again while he was asleep at night, again without any act of intervention being witnessed. These two completely undeniable events seem to have spurred in-depth investigations by the hospitals and the media. Since then a number of people have claimed inexplicable recoveries from disease, though not again from injury."

"Yeah, the news guys have been making waves about it, and about the local recovery statistics being higher than average for incurable diseases this past year, and yadda yadda yadda." Ray shook his head. "Fraser, don't try to tell me Victoria was doing super-medicine and that's what kept her stuck in this locale. Just say no to that notion."

"Yeah?" Kowalski leaned at him. "What if she got rich out of being a secret ninja medic?"

"Unlikely," Fraser said reasonably. "The investigation specifically looked for payments made by the patients who'd been healed or cured. There weren't any. As well, the news stories said these beneficiaries apparently were chosen randomly, not for any obvious trait or connection. It follows they weren't selected for their ability to pay high fees."

"Fraser, we got two transparent suspects and one is female, guess who, they claim they've had three Victoria sightings, they claim they know all about Stella's murder because they saw it in a vision," and then Ray made the mistake of stopping to breathe.

"One correction, Ray. The author of the notes always uses the singular. He, or she, saw Victoria alone and he, or she, was the one who had the vision."

"Whatever. He, or she, doesn't, or don't, claim to be the ones that did or didn't make my boo-boo all better, so you can forget about that part and we can get back to business."

"Ray. There's a well-known principle of logic called Occam's Razor. In theorizing, maximize simplicity. The best explanation of a phenomenon is usually the simplest one. By that rule, it's weak logic to assume the invisible couple and the healer, or healers, were two different groups. It's more logical that your recovery coincided with a visit from invisible people simply because they were one and the same as the people who healed you. By extension, the other patients whose recoveries were 'idiopathic' had the same invisible healers."

"I still say--"

"Vecchio, red light, shut up. Fraser, green light, move it on."

Fraser sighed and straightened up.

"What are you trying to say, Fraser? That these people are the good guys? They'd be wearing white hats if we could only see the hats?" Ray laughed. "Suppose the female isn't Victoria and suppose they are the Gonzo Healers of Tampa Bay, does that mean we trust them? First I want to know what they're after. Nobody does anything for free." He looked at Fraser's stubborn face and had to smile, even if it came out sour. "Except Canadians, but that's the exception that proves the rule. I guarantee you these people want something from us or they wouldn't keep coming back with more notes."

"I can tell ya one thing they don't want." Kowalski jabbed two fingers at him. "They wanted us dead, we'd be toast by now. Crispy crunchy crumbly."

"Victoria doesn't want us dead either, not till she's ready. That says to me the invisibles have things in common with her and there's nothing to stop them from all being a big happy team."

"Astonishing as it may seem, Ray, most of the people in the world don't want us dead and nevertheless aren't helping Victoria. Do you recall Eloise Barrow, Ray?"

"After your time, Vecchio." Kowalski threw Ray a so-sorry-you're-shut-out smirk. "The faith-healer girl. The one with God's gift of making money for her foster parents who'd killed off the real ones."

"Exactly. I fear that part of Victoria's commitment to staying in this area, and all of her interest in the person who's sighted her in his or her vicinity, stem from her desire to use the healers to enrich herself. She's hunting for them. I suppose I don't have to say she shouldn't find them."

********

Half of the crowd in the mall came from the Pudgy Pale People Planet, got to be tourists, the other half came from Melanoma Manor. Maybe Ray had been in the Northwest Areas too long, but he thought deep tans sucked. People weren't meant to look like they'd been cured like leather. Which was a lot stinkier process, involving piss and mashed brains, than Ray had known before he got the lecture on proper preparation of hides.

He wondered whether Stella had been getting a tan. Shit. Only Vecchio knew that.

Ray sneaked a sideways glance. Vecchio, who was not all that tan now that Ray looked for it, was watching the jewelry store across the aisle. His mouth was compressed, a secrets-keeping mouth, like the store was a place he was going to break into. Or like the window display made him think about Metcalf's diamond watch. Which meant, Stella. Shit.

"I went out to the cemetery first thing this morning," Ray said, cautious.

"It doesn't even open till ten, Kowalski. That's your idea of 'first thing'?"

Vecchio looked like this double image of himself, one guy who just wanted to blow off sympathy, one guy who just wanted it. Guy number two you could almost like.

Ray said, "Saw the design card. It's gonna be a nice marker when it's done."

Guy two won. "Yeah. You should've seen what her family wanted to stick up." Pause. "A great big white marble angel with Stella's face." Ray groaned and gave a thumbs-down. In return Vecchio shook his head, not exactly laughing. "They wouldn't settle for a little angel -- it'd be too easy to steal."

"Shyeah. That figures."

An angel. No way. Maybe one of those women from Viking heaven, who came to pick up warriors' souls off of battlefields. Not that Stell would ever settle for playing fiftytwo pick-up for eternity. She'd be in there slugging. What were those women called, it was, no it was not "valeries." He'd have to ask Frase.

The Mountie was still standing in the health store, talking cheerfully to the "whole body health consultant" in the little booth where the health books were. She was lightly-tanned, gold skin, red hair, thirty or so. If she kept leaning at Fraser like that, she was going to stick that way so bad she'd have to live another thirty years just to straighten up again.

The dark brown uniform made Fraser look better than fire-engine red ever had. It kind of made you think of chocolate, which, always a good thing to get into any situation. But clothes, Fraser, two great tastes that shouldn't ever have to go together. Look at him standing there, you could see he was beautiful. Get the clothes out of the way, he was beauty. You wished you never had to use your eyes for anything else again.

Look at him. You could see the earnestness, the smartness, the mannersness right there. Get those out of the way, you saw the kindness. Take out another layer, you got the pride. A boatload of that but even more of the next thing, the vulnerability. Keep on getting things out of the way and you got to the center. Good will. And it was good goodness, the real thing. And it was will, you better believe it.

But look again. Right this minute the important thing was the dark tired smudges under those beautiful clear gray-blue eyes.

"Kowalski." Vecchio was watching him watch Fraser. There was the mouth full of secrets again, except after last night Ray was pretty sure what these secrets were. "See the shop cop eyeballing us?"

The white-shirt was on the other side of the aisle over between Lewey's Jewelry and Sharper Image. Ray waved at him and leaned back lazily against the health store window.

"Maybe ya aren't dressed well enough to fit in here, Vecchio."

"Maybe you look like somebody swept out a jail cell with your face, Kowalski."

"Ya oughta see the other guy. He looks worse. A lot worse."

"Nice as it's been to relive the low points of fifth grade wit and wisdom, we have business to do. Bring him over here, we need to talk shop."

Ray bristled. "Get him yourself."

Vecchio just sighed impatiently and patted the wheels of his chair. Shit. That cover of his got him almost as much mileage as Dief got from being "deaf."

"What for? He's on duty now, so he wasn't around last night."

"Look there. Jewels. Overpriced hi-tech." When Vecchio pointed at the two stores it definitely got the white-shirt's attention. "That means smile, we're on candid camera."

"Right you are," said Fraser behind them, making both of them jump.

********

"Look, guys," said John Brill, re-settling his khaki jacket to hang slightly differently. "When the PD comes by, which you say they will, they can advise me about whether to release the security video to any investigators besides the department."

"Understood. Perhaps you could phone Detective Triff or Detective Kaufman and ask when they can come and whether we can view it with them."

"You said they got handed this note last night. Why haven't they been here already?"

"I believe there was a question as to which evidence should get first priority in the investigation." Or any priority, it might seem.

Brill considered that. His mouth jumped to the right and back again like the carriage on a typewriter; it was very likely a sign of uncertainty.

"Look, it's my job to uphold the mall's privacy policy."

Fraser could see the citizen in Brill, and the mall manager too, and the complex balance between the roles. He judged the pans of the scale might be shifting --

"This woman we're after is what the movies like to call a pure stone killer," said Ray Vecchio in a chill voice, quite unlike himself. He smoothed his tie and leaned forward. "We're talking homicide and assault, a week ago, and you gotta know that a case that isn't solved after twenty-four hours is a case that's getting away from you. Now I respect your customers' privacy, but with a killer maybe walking around in your mall less than twelve hours ago... If you give her more time to hang out here, you're doing her a favour but you aren't doing any favours for your human customers."

Brill stared at him; then his eyes clouded.

"Because you're right about that point," Brill said quickly, looking at Ray Vecchio's brow and not his eyes, "what I'll do is this. Right this minute I'll go look at that video and get a capture of the woman's face, so I can hand out a picture to the boys and they can keep an eye out for her. But, frankly," and now he looked Fraser in the eye, "you guys aren't cops -- okay, I know you're a constable in the Mounties, but in Tampa your jurisdiction is bupkis -- and I have to have a lotta doubts about involving you."

"The course you propose is certainly as far as your duty extends," Fraser agreed, not stressing the word "duty." In his experience the word carried its own stress.

Brill's mouth jumped again. "This won't take but a few minutes." He stepped into his office's back room and closed the door.

Fraser took off his Stetson and turned it between his hands. He was aware that Ray was pantomiming a desire to strangle Ray, and was being shrugged away disdainfully. He himself wasn't so concerned with whether Ray's interruption had spoiled their chance (always weak) of persuading Brill.

This wasn't the first time a surveillance had put him deeply at odds with Ray Vecchio.

Ray. Listen to me. You are not thinking. And a police officer who doesn't think is dangerous.

I know where you stand.

No, you do not. You're so full of hate, all you can see is Zuko. That's all you've been able to see right from the beginning... Do you honestly believe that by jailing him, you won't have to feel guilty anymore?

The outcome had been the purest tragedy.

"Ray," he said finally. His own Ray came and stood by him, rubbing his hands on his jeans as though anger could be wiped off like dirt.

"Don't defend her to me, Fraser." Ray Vecchio looked up from the wheelchair with the same expression Fraser remembered: eyes that were dark green with resentment and an unreachable sense of vindication. No. Even more than anyone else, Ray would be reachable if only the right words could be found.

"I have no desire to defend her," Fraser said, "and no loyalty to her. None, Ray."

"She was the one who came first the last time. Never again. This time Stella comes first."

"As you say."

The phone in the pocket of Ray's jeans let out its shrill call, an unpleasant sound that suited the unpleasant moment. Ray growled in frustration and brought the phone to his stubbled cheek. Fraser was sadly relieved to have an excuse to look away from Ray Vecchio.

"Yeah? Uh, Lieutenant. Sir." Ray's face was consternated. "I didn't... I figured I was... Yeah, sorry, I shoulda. I am? He did?" Ray looked at Ray in amazement. Then he gazed at Brill's door and his face broke into 'the smile on the face of the tiger.' Absently he swung a long leg over the back of Brill's chair and clambered over it to lounge, legs sprawled, on the seat. "This is really good timing, sir. This is the greatest of great timing. Mountie timing, you got it." Ray pulled his disused badge out and grinned at it. "Carranza. Gotcha. Thanks. Does this mean the city pays my way back to Chicago? Uh. Yessir. Bye. What?" He looked at Ray Vecchio again, assessingly. "Sure I remember Siracusa. Yeah?"

Fraser's attention homed in on what he'd been trying politely to ignore.

"That whole event has been cleared up in a creditable manner," a distant Lieutenant Welsh said with a kind of stern delicacy. "That event and a few others like it, which you may possibly hear more about from Lieutenant Carranza now that he's been made aware of the facts. As I'm sure his detectives will soon be."

"Today them, tomorrow the rest of the world," said Ray cynically.

"We live in an information economy, Detective. Go out and make your contribution to it." The click of a downed telephone receiver.

Ray favoured Ray Vecchio with a pondering scowl, then looked a question at Fraser.

"You've been on administrative leave all the time, apparently, and now you aren't," Fraser said to his partner.

"Ears like a bat with special genes plugged in," Ray said fondly and unscientifically. "I'm on the job and Brill's on the hook." He threw in, as an aside, "That was your first smart move today, Vecchio," as he strode up to Brill's door.

He knocked. "Mister Brill? I just got a call from my Lieutenant in Chicago. Me and my badge are on this case officially as of now. If ya don't think I got the bonifieds, check in with Lieutenant Carranza at the PD."

The door opened. "Why bother the cops?" said Brill, mouth twisted down in irony. "This video is no good to anyone. You'll see."

********

17:01:00... 17:01:15...

Yeah, Brill had a point. His customers had all sorts of privacy. The camera was angled down to get a good shot of the sidewalk right outside the luxury stores. Across the aisle, though? Women were minus heads, men were shortened at the pits, only the kids were all there.

Ray could sort of see people inside the health food store, even though it closed at five on Sundays. They were out of focus even when he put his glasses on. He counted eleven blur-oids sitting in a circle several feet back from the storefront.

Okay. Ten chances out of nine, the invisi-snitch had known the camera was a guillotine in disguise, which made this whole thing what Frannie would call a red anchovy.

17:05:30...

A gap in the ped traffic on both sides of the aisle.

17:06:45...

Most of a woman walked into view over there. Nothing special. All sorts of women at home had a body and legs as good as that because Chicago was great that way. Especially any part of it that Fraser the babe-magnet was in.

So this one was supposed to be the killer, according to the clock and the invisi-snitch. Did she look like anything hazardous in the from-the-neck-down category?

Studying her, Ray remembered a kid's story. The cat who walked by himself. 'Walking by his wild lone, and all places were alike to him.'

17:09:00...

Tick, tock. The loner woman was off the screen and more of the headless wandered through.

Fraser said, "Play it back from seventeen-oh-five." He sounded like he'd been sharpened, like he could cut air molecules apart.

He'd recognized her. Then that really had been Metcalf.

We're going to bring her down for you, Stell.

********

Brill said, "You aren't getting anything from this, are you?"

"A second look might help," said Fraser.

Hearing that tone of voice from him again, this time Ray had to look at him. Apparently Kowalski did too. He was staring, his mouth a little open. He looked anxious and surprisingly baby-faced behind those dorky Buddy Holly glasses.

17:05:00...

Fraser kept watching the screen with his head cocked a little and his eyebrows raised. Ray knew that reckless expression from the Gerrard days, he knew it a lot better than Kowalski could, and it wasn't playful or smiling even though a stranger might mistake it for that for maybe one-tenth of a second. Fraser's mouth was drawn in, making his smile creases into dark slanted lines at the corners -- that was Mountie self-control. His eyes were cold and wide-pupiled -- that was fury.

Not actually the smiley face of a man who wanted to play cheerful games. It was more what you'd see on a hunter who'd finally tracked down some big game.

Ray could just about've cried with relief.

********

Victoria at last.

She still moved like a hawk in the air, as if there were nothing in the world that should hold her back.

Not a drop of blood in his body that still wanted to be at her service. Finally, finally, he could act purely in the service of justice. That was good, because the ruthlessness gathering in him could only, only be allowed to run if it was on the rails of law. Being so governed left him with a paradoxical freedom.

17:07:00...

Her hair was shorter, only its ends visible, still dark and curling. She wore a brown and amber dress with striped elbow-length chiffon sleeves. Short amber gloves, probably leather, almost the same hue as her tanned forearms. Brown shoes, elegantly formed, lacking any high heels that would interfere with her running. Certainly a fashion to be preferred by all fugitives from justice.

In the health-supplement store behind her three of the men in the seated group turned to watch her pass. A woman glanced as well. Those reactions were to be expected, but the individuals' subsequent movements were less generic and therefore more telling.

17:09:15...

"Did that do you anything?" asked the mall manager.

Fraser caught Ray's eye, and Ray's. He saw that both of them seconded his intention to depart without saying more.

"From the point of view of identification, it's regrettable that neither her face nor her earlobes were visible," he said truthfully. "Nevertheless, the tape is worth bringing to the attention of Detectives Triff and Kaufman of the Tampa Police Department. Thank you kindly for your assistance, Mr. Brill."

********

"Whadda we got, whadda we got?" Kowalski slammed his door and started yattering before Ray had edged himself with visible care into the driver's seat, and also before Fraser had put the wheelchair away in the trunk much less put himself into the car.

"We got a little patience," said Ray, patiently. "Which is a word you don't know without asking the reference librarian, right?"

"Wrong, Vecchio. I know what which means. Don't you?"

"Somebody who does magic, genius." Ray tossed a headset at Kowalski's nose, started the Lexus up, and plugged the noise-generator into the lighter.

"This is Stell's car." Kowalski sounded hostile. Or maybe unhappy. He probably couldn't tell the difference himself.

Several comebacks went through Ray's mind but too many of them left him thinking about Stella and Kowalski with a big 'and.' He went for, "Hey, you don't have Alzheimer's. Millions cheer for you."

"Don't ya have your own car?"

"You bet your butt I do, and I've got reasons for using this one instead. I don't want your drool all over my car, because if you saw it you would definitely drool--"

"Not another Riviera, then."

"--shut your mouth, and it's more conspicuous than this, plus this thing has an couple of extra security features. Aren't you gonna go give Fraser a hand with the wheelchair?"

"Ya think?"

Fraser came in and settled in the seat behind Kowalski's. He closed his door the nice-guy way, first rolling down his window a crack to keep six eardrums from popping.

"Did ya want any help with that, Frase?"

"Not at all, Ray. It was hardly a two-man task, and I was closer to the chair at the moment Ray left it."

He took the remaining headset, thanking Ray.

"Sleeves and gloves again," said Kowalski.

"Yes. It's increasingly likely the purpose is concealment."

"Bet she knew her head was cut off. And the snitch knew he was off-camera just as much as she was."

"No, no. I think he didn't expect her, nor was he aware of the camera or its limitations."

"Those three guys in the store who were giving her the eye? Or the woman who looked around?"

"Only one of the four, a man, looked at a wristwatch as she walked past."

"Bet he was faking it."

"Whether or no, he's still the one person who visibly made a connection between her walk-by and the time of day."

"The snake-oil clerk knew his name?"

"The people in the store were a meeting of the Hepatitis Outreach and Patient Education group. Miss Laszlo wasn't working that shift. She feels the proprietor, who was at the meeting, will be unwilling to provide descriptions or reveal the identities of any members. Hepatitis remains a socially stigmatized disease, it's sad to say."

"Yeah, it's a big sad thing." Kowalski jiggled in his seat. "Now we go to the PD, get me a shiny new cop credential, come back here, and play find-Waldo with Miss Laszlo and her boss."

"Actually, Ray... didn't you have some reason to doubt the discretion of a few isolated individuals in the Tampa Police Department?"

"No, Frase. They don't have any, so there's zero there to doubt, ya see? And subtract it from itself for extra zero-hood."

"If we keep trying to locate the witness, perhaps especially if we have PD help, we could be showing Victoria who he is."

Kowalski jeered, just by reflex probably, and waved his hands around. Ray watched it go back and forth between the Mountie and the Polack with the words and looks they gave each other working like some kind of needle sewing them together. Like even if the amount of distance between them was small, it was still a rip or a wound that had to be stitched up.

Honeymooners. It wore him down like another bullet in the belly just to be anywhere near them. He'd been on honeymoon till Victoria Metcalf came in the door.

Okay, he could get a silver lining out of having them doing their ritual mating dance right up in his face. He could use it to remind him of everything he'd lost.

"Ray?"

"Hey! Vecchio!" Kowalski's right hand was waving about an inch from his nose.

"If your hand ever does that again, I'm gonna make sure you have to starve to death the next time you're undercover as a Moslem," Ray told Kowalski. "So, are we going to the PD or not, Fraser?"

As Ray drove he took opportunities to watch Fraser's face in the rearview mirror, because Kowalski wasn't in shape to catch him doing it. Kowalski was leaned over against his door and staring out the window like he was about to climb out through it. If he was having a Stella flashback, that was his tough luck. Her sedan was still the best choice for business.

Who knew? Maybe her car would be in at the death. That'd be a little bit like Stella being there and knowing he'd kept the faith with her, a little bit like justice.

There was a crease between Benny's eyebrows and his eyes met Ray's in the mirror.

"I was relieved to see that the man who spotted her didn't attempt pursuit," Benny said. "It seems he isn't a vigilante. Had he been, it would've been very dangerous."

"Yeah, that's for sure." Now Ray figured out why Fraser had caught his eye. It hadn't been innocent or friendly. "Yeah, the only thing more dangerous than a vigilante is a defense lawyer plus a jury. Thirteen dangerous people in the same room. Thirteen people eager to let a killer like, say, O.J. Simpson walk out the door. Because he was good-looking and rich and could hire lawyers who knew how to play a jury. You know, just the way Victoria will be once she lawyers up."

Fraser stiffened. "Not having been empaneled as a juror in the Simpson case, I can't very well speak to the correctness of that court decision."

"How about a case you do know? How long is it till Gerrard comes up for parole?"

"Under the so-called faint hope clause, which applies because he committed only one homicide, it'll be six years."

"So that's what a Canadian jury does with a murderer. Thank God Florida is a death-penalty state. Maybe there's hope."

"Fat chance it'll get that far, Vecchio," said Kowalski, snarling. "Ya know why? You're why. I can hear it now. Whaddaya got? Physical evidence? No. Circumstantial? No. Ya got any little thing at all? We got an eyewitness, a survivor. Cool, what does he remember? Some of this over here, none of that over there, in summary members of the jury his memory has got holes in it like the teeshirt I wash the Goat with. Even Stella couldn't get a conviction out of that shit."

"We will find all the evidence we need." Fraser's voice was solid.

I have all the evidence I'll ever need, thought Ray.

********

Lieutenant Carranza had a long, pale face with high Spanish cheekbones and very measuring deep-brown eyes. He spoke softly, and his bull-pen was quieter than the norm.

"Vecchio," he said. Fraser quelled an urge to move between him and Ray Vecchio instead of remaining behind the wheelchair. "I'm sorry Detective Triff and Detective Kaufman aren't here. They're out on business."

"Not a problem. I have plenty of time for them later."

Carranza nodded and his gaze passed to Ray.

"Uh, Lieutenant." Ray made an expressive gesture that had the quality of a salute even though his hand never rose above heart height. "Detective Ray Kowalski, CPD. My lieutenant..."

"Lieutenant Welsh, yes, we have spoken." Carranza didn't appear impressed or, for that matter, particularly unimpressed. "Detective, what's your past association with this case?"

"When Metcalf hit Chicago? I wasn't in the Two-Seven back then. Fraser was liaisoning with the precinct. It was his case and Vecchio's. I'm his partner now, for purposes of liaison."

Ray Vecchio's shoulders jerked once. That would be an almost, but only almost, uncontrollable laugh. Ray sent him a voiceless snarl. Both were still vibrating with antipathy from the argument in the car. No matter, it would pass.

"That's the kind of association," Ray said defiantly.

"Nothing else?" Carranza studied Ray's defensive expression. "That is, I understood you had another tie to the case? This would be the time to mention it."

Ray's face went tight and smooth. "The victim was my ex-wife."

"Yes. Sorry for my forcing of the subject." Carranza flattened one long-fingered hand on his desk, as though he were deliberately leaving a perfect palm-print for a clue, and looked up from it into Fraser's eyes.

"I've heard about you. Benton Fraser, RCMP, holding the rank of constable."

"As you say, Leftenant. I first came to Chicago on the trail of the killers of my father and remained attached as liaison with the Canadian consulate. In due course Victoria Metcalf was released from prison and came to Chicago to carry out her... rather involved... revenge, I having been the officer who originally arrested her and turned her in for bank robbery."

"The word 'revenge' sounds personal, Constable."

"That is the most accurate description, sir." Fraser remained at attention.

Carranza pondered him a moment, then wiped his hand across the desk.

"Detective -- Constable -- the department's position is that both of you are accredited to work on the Vecchio case, but only in an advisory role. That position I agree with, because it's a fact both of you are personally involved. The policy is even the same in Chicago, right?"

"Yes, sir."

"Lieutenant, I gotta--"

"Vecchio," said Lieutenant Carranza, interrupting and ignoring Ray's fervent protest. His face turned bemused when both Rays responded to the name. "Vecchio, there's some bad news for you. Before you came in, we received word that your house was on fire."

Ray Vecchio's body drew in on itself. Fraser set a hand on his shoulder.

"How bad?" So much pain in Ray's voice.

"The structure was fully involved."

Over to the side, Ray was muttering, "shit, shit, shit..."

Ray's head dropped, his long neck bent and vulnerable, and the wheelchair seemed to sag as if he weighed on it more heavily. The Lieutenant assessed him with eyes that were interrogator's instruments; then he exhaled between his teeth and viewed Ray with more humanity.

"Ray..." Fraser said carefully.

Ray looked up at him with clear suffering eyes as if they were alone in the room. "Last time it was your home, Benny. This time it's our home. She doesn't change."

"She, meaning Victoria Metcalf?" Carranza asked.

"Your father's cabin, right?" Ray rocked heel to toe and back.

Fraser said "Yes," to all three of them and explained it to the Lieutenant. "She set fire to the cabin as a way of drawing attention to the currency she had placed in a fireproof container buried under the floorboards. The bills traced back to the bank robbery in which she'd been the driver of the getaway vehicle. Her subterfuge was intended to prove I had guilty knowledge of the robbery."

"She doesn't change," Ray Vecchio repeated. "But we searched the house with Triff yesterday and he went through the crawlspace too. She'd've had to set up the frame since then."

"Maybe not in your house, too much like before, lightning never does it twice," Ray contradicted, his fingers twiddling his bracelet. "A storage unit, ya got anything like that?"

The answer was clear.

********

When they got to the bowling alley, a gusty, sweaty wind was blowing fast-food wrappers and yellow flower petals down the street, thunder chasing along behind. Kaufman and Triff were waiting out at the front door. Some blues had made the scene too, so there were strobing cop cars parked cattywampus in the lot. Carranza pulled in behind.

"Well, if it isn't the Devil Rays," said Kaufman.

"Well, if it isn't the media's bosom buddy," Ray said back.

Vecchio handed him a big keyring full of keys and a couple of specialty-looking remote controls. Ray did the unlocking, glaring at Vecchio, who hadn't been worrying about playing invalid when he was driving the car like he'd demanded to. If he kept that shit up, Ray was going to make him eat that wheelchair. With a side of fresh-squeezed Florida orange juice.

"Excuse me," and Fraser slid through the door before the Tampa boys could beat him to it. The Lieutenant gave them a look.

What would Fraser want next? Ray didn't need to be told. He had it ready by the time the whole bunch of them got to the hall outside the office.

Frase did his polite crossing-guard thing, holding the eager crowd back from the popcorn. "It appears no one has entered the office through this door since we left," he said, head tilted, studying the mess.

"That's a really... corny... gimmick," managed Kaufman, looking like he wasn't going to believe his eyes about this till, maybe, a week from now.

Ray tossed the digital camera. The Mountie caught it, didn't so much as look to see it coming. Ray had to grin -- he and Ben still had That Thing going. Vecchio, on the other hand? That reaction wasn't a smile at all.

Fraser took a couple of shots of the white stuff, returned the camera to Ray by air mail.

"A comparison with our earlier photograph will document the absence of disturbance. You're free to pass, gentlemen."

"What makes this one li'l room worth wasting your junk food on?" Triff asked Vecchio.

"My guns," said Vecchio promptly. "Victoria Metcalf likes to steal your gun to frame you with, remember?"

"So if we find a gun in there that was used in a crime, it has to be yours because of the popcorn cordon. That's logical, right?"

"Take a look," Vecchio said, just as sure of himself and hostile as any mobbed-up guy. "Be my guest."

********

"What happened after Hacker left last night?"

"What hacker?" Ray brushed at his suit jacket and eyed Triff.

"Kaufman. Cough-man. Hack-er." Triff sounded like he was imitating his partner's speech tricks. He gave Ray's face a twice-over. "Where'd you get all that damage?"

"I had a fashion clash with Kowalski."

"And you a cripple boy. Tsk, tsk, tsk, he shouldn't have done that. After that, what?"

"Sleepy time."

"Till when?"

"I got up about eight, called for some takeout, and left a voice message for my lawyer."

"You make those calls from your cellphone?"

"Land line, for privacy."

"Checkable," Triff said. "Next?"

Ray looked back over his shoulder. A couple of blues were going through his snack bar. Those clowns were leaving a bigger mess than ten teenagers on crack. Ray made a mental note -- he'd have to stop Fraser from cleaning that up later.

"After that I called my security consultant," Ray said, "and had them bring in some counter-surveillance gear. They checked this office, the phones, and the car while they were at it."

"Why?"

"Victoria Metcalf got through my security system once. She won't get another chance."

"They find anything?"

"No."

"Checkable. Next?"

"I called my lieutenant in Chicago about how to communicate more effectively with your precinct." Ray thought the call might have accomplished something besides giving Kowalski a thrill. Triff was actually acting like a pro this time. "Right after that call ended, my lawyer called me back and we talked about updating my will."

Triff raised his eyebrows.

"You sure are scared of this one li'l lady."

Yeah, genius. I'm as scared as a wolf watching a throat.

Triff tried hard not to be out-waited, but he lost the match. "All this telephonic activity was on your land-line?"

"That part you got right."

"Detective," came Carranza's voice. "I need Mr. Vecchio for a few words."

The pool table area was the closest thing to a privacy zone, what with blues going through all the cabinets and all the ball lockers. The Lieutenant didn't offer to push the wheelchair. Ray respected that.

After looking around for eavesdroppers, Carranza said, "Your lieutenant called me specifically to tell me you were a good officer, always on the job, and he wouldn't like us to let any harm come to you. I think he meant more?"

"It depends who's listening," Ray said.

The lieutenant lowered his voice. "Always on the job?"

Ray was about to hedge, but maybe that wasn't a great idea in this particular situation, maybe it was nothing but a bad habit right now.

"Not since the shooting," he answered.

"Tell me, is there anything here that should not be un-covered?"

Ray shook his head. "No problem."

"Then we proceed."

********

"Let's pretend this Victoria Metcalf burned down your house. Why'd she do it, you think?" Kaufman asked.

He'd called Ray over and made him wheel himself all the way to the locker area. It'd looked like his plan was to find out just how much of a pain in the gut the trip really was for Mr. Invalid the suspect.

Ray said, "She's figured out the three of us are staying together to keep her from getting to Fraser. If she makes diversions here and there, maybe she can make us split up to chase three different trails and then she gets her big moment."

"A CTS decon van showed up at your place around noon and left about an hour before the fire started."

"Did your informant happen to say what company it was?"

"Are you im-plying it was somebody you didn't hire? The guy had a key to the front door," Kaufman said, almost a taunt.

Ray shrugged. He knew better than to be a boccalone. Let Kaufman be the one to run his big mouth.

********

"Ya sure it was a man?" Ray used both hands to make an hourglass gesture.

"Back to the she-demon theory again." Triff sighed loudly.

"Was this person-with-key wearing a biohazard suit?" Ray put a foot up on the ball rack.

"Wrong question. The right question is, where were you at that time?"

"I tell ya what, we were talking to the security manager at the Quadrangle Mall not too long after high noon." Ray smiled to himself as he worked it out -- if Victoria had been at Vecchio's casa, then she hadn't followed them to the mall. Excellence. Fire or no fire, she wasn't really a step ahead. "Ask Mr. Brill and his cameras what time we were there."

"Instead, suppose I ask you why you were there?"

"We were investigating the tip about Victoria Metcalf being there last night. How about you? Been out there to do your job yet?"

"You boys really crave to put this onto the devil-lady. Why in hell would she bother with it?"

"She wants to wipe Vecchio out."

"That's a noble plan but who are you kidding? He's insured. All God's children ought to be as insured as he is, and you know something? Houses aren't selling so well around there these days. Not so well at all. Do you get my drift?"

"I get your whole fucking avalanche."

********

Lieutenant Carranza closed his cellular phone. He sent a quick glance over his shoulder. Fraser, in his turn, glanced over at the search. So far the officers had opened only the unrented lockers, the ones for which Ray Vecchio still held both sets of keys. Twelve locker doors had been marked with sticky gold-paper stars to show they'd been found free of contraband.

"One firefighter says he saw signs of an accelerant. The arson investigator hasn't arrived yet." The Lieutenant gave Fraser a long examination. "All three of you were quick to suggest it was arson."

"It's consistent with Victoria Metcalf's pattern."

"There are other possibilities."

"Certainly," Fraser acknowledged, choosing to face the hint full-on, looking steadily back at Carranza. "Because we're best qualified to recognise her signature on a crime, we're also best qualified to forge it. You can be sure she too understands that."

"Lieutenant?" called a young female officer. "Sorry to interrupt. We have two suitcases over here." She caught Fraser's eye in a very deliberate way.

"Yes, those are mine." He pulled at his collar.

"We need to go through them, sir."

"Indeed." Fraser turned back to Carranza. "If I may be excused for the moment, Leftenant."

Carranza nodded sharply. The subject was not, and of course could not be, closed for good.

The policewoman smiled at Fraser as he approached. He returned a correct, ready-to-help nod and smile. Her brown eyes widened. He doffed his hat in courtesy without meeting her eyes again as he did so.

What, precisely, was she seeing? What was it that so many other women (and men) had seen, so often? A kind of desperation seemed to underlie their attentions. It was hard to say which idea was more distressing: that their urgency might come only from his appearance, or that it came from something more permanent and defining about him.

Victoria had never had that desperation.

Ray sometimes called himself needy, but he'd never had it either.

"Here are my keys." He reached them out to the officer, already knowing she would brush her fingers against his.

"Ireson!" It was Detective Kaufman's abrasive voice. He was striding toward them. "That's my job, right? You just know I'm right. Go help out with the lockers, it's moving slow. Please, dear lady."

Kaufman was not completely irrepressible. After winking at the disappointed policewoman, he flipped through assorted articles of uniform and civilian clothing without comment. He did give Fraser a bemused glance when he found the starched boxers. Partway through the first duffle bag Kaufman's unnatural reserve broke down.

"What's this?" He opened the small packsack.

"It's called a kerfuffle kit. Items for unexpected situations."

Duct tape, a small well-balanced knife and its scabbard, a patch of felt of the same colour as his Stetson, a small sewing kit, a sturdy metal-cased pocket flashlight, a selection of bandages, et cetera...

"Were you ever a Boy Scout?"

"Proper preparation is essential in many venues."

"No-o kidding."

Deep in the side pouch Kaufman found an item that surprised him long enough to give Fraser time to hide his own surprise. And his apprehension as well.

"Hey. This is a dog collar." The detective held it up. Automatically Fraser noted that it was of a size to fit Dief, it was ornamented with two parallel lines of steel braid, and its stitching was clumsy.

Kaufman said, "Does this mean you're properly prepared to find a dog?"

"He remained in Canada."

"Without his collar? Baaad dog."

"A collar can be deadly for a free-ranging animal in a timbered area, owing to the risk of the wearer being trapped, or even strangled or hanged, if the collar should become hooked over a branch or some other protrusion. While living in Chicago, however, Diefenbaker was more at risk without a collar."

The detective studied Fraser's expert, and possibly even pedantic, expression. He muttered, "Real piece of work," and went back to his task.

He'd just finished the search, with no explicit findings, when over at the lockers Officer Ireson said, "Hey, this one has a blocked lock."

********

Out of a count of twenty-four opened, twenty-two were gold-star material, two were jammed. The Lieutenant called in to get a bomb dog, which sniffed everything, sat down, and sulked like his chew toy had run off with a cat.

Kaufman picked at one of the two keyholes with the needle Fraser had loaned him. The cops were crowded around, along with Vecchio. Too many excited people in a small space. The air was starting to smell like adrenaline glands.

Fraser and the Lieutenant stood apart from everyone else. Ray craned to look around Triff's sunburned neck.

"What's it blocked with? Superglue?"

"Back off," Triff snapped.

"No. It's small pieces of cardboard," answered Fraser.

Key. Needle. Cardboard chaff falling into an evidence bag taped under the lock. Key. Needle. Chaff. Key.

The key turned.

Kaufman put on gloves and began to pull out soft cloth.

"Be careful with that," Triff said.

It was a woman's dress. It was a familiar dark-red gown for ballroom dancing. It was too much, catching Ray off guard like it did. He turned his back and thought hard about keeping his face steady.

"You recognize that." Lieutenant Carranza.

"It belongs to my wife." Vecchio, in a blank voice.

"You mean it belongs to you." Triff.

Ray took a quick look. Vecchio's face was tight, but not masked. Fraser was looking back and forth between him and Ray, all confused with two-way sympathy. Kaufman draped the gown over Triff's arm and started pulling another one out.

"This was in your house yesterday," said Triff to Vecchio. "And so was that one. What happened, you were afraid they might get stolen? Or you wanted to keep them around for sentimental mementos?"

"Sentimental mementos, say that five times fast," muttered Kaufman.

"I didn't put them here," and now Vecchio sounded dangerous.

"That's right," Ray said. "He didn't. I was in sight of him yesterday after the search, I was in sight of him all last night, he didn't take any of that."

"Look at this." Kaufman held up a string of sparklers. "Jewelry, too."

Ray didn't recognize that one. It was the kind of necklace that advertised itself. It wouldn't have flattered any woman who wore it. Not a Stella thing, not even a Vecchio thing. He wondered if it had come from that dirtball Orsini.

"It figures," said Vecchio, still using a voice that'd fit having his gun aimed at someone. "It's as perfect as it can get. All of what's in the locker -- these are the things I didn't inherit."

"Who knew that other than your attorneys?" Fraser was so focused he practically glowed.

"This is the time to take all our questions to the station," Lieutenant Carranza said quietly.

"Am I under arrest?" demanded Vecchio.

Carranza slowly shook his head no.

Vecchio's eyes were dark and intense and his mouth was set. He wasn't post-Vegas any more, he was psyched for the big fight.

Ray had to admit it looked good on him. Shit. Maybe Stella had thought so too. There had to be some explanation.

Vecchio gave Carranza one of those unsmiles. "Don't take it personally, but I'm gonna want my lawyer around for this."

********

Fraser thought they'd been fortunate, under the circumstances. Though they didn't arrive till after nine, his hotel still had a few vacancies. All were on the first floor and therefore posed a security risk. Fraser's reservation, on the other hand, was on the third floor.

Ray Vecchio toweled the rain off his head and argued through the towel. He refused to exchange rooms. "You're the one she's really after, Benny. You take the high ground." He couldn't be dissuaded.

"We might be able to persuade one of my third-floor neighbours to exchange rooms with you," Fraser suggested. "Two rooms next to each other would be more defensible."

"Benny, I don't wanna hurt your feelings," he didn't look at Fraser as he spoke, "but there isn't a wall thick enough for me to wanna sleep on one side of it when you and Kowalski are on the other side. Especially not after a day like this."

"Understood." Fraser took a deep breath. "Perhaps Ray could stay here and guard you, then."

"No!"

"No, and also no," agreed Ray, leaning on the wall, thumbs in his jean pockets. Fraser would have expected him to take umbrage at Ray Vecchio's comment, but he'd showed an instant of -- sympathy? -- instead. Now Ray's blue eyes met Fraser's, and he said, "Frase, clean the maple sugar outta your ears. Vecchio's a big boy now and he's carrying. You're target numero uno and you're minus gun. You get the bodyguard, you get the safe room."

"That's it, Fraser. Not another word." The other Ray looked as mule-headed as Fraser had ever seen him. And it was the kind of stubbornness Fraser remembered, not the new cold-eyed thuggish hardness that he'd already seen too much of.

"As you wish."

"Thattaboy," said Ray with deep approval and an electric flash of grin. "That's all settled, and I'm gonna get the luggage."

"Bring my bags here, if you would."

"Fraser--"

"Just for now. There's something the three of us should discuss before we're separated for the night."

"Huh." Ray shot him a suspicious look and was out the door.

Ray Vecchio sat down hard in the chair by the desk. He leaned forward and put his face in his hands, rubbing them back and forth. Belatedly Fraser turned off most of the lights in order to keep himself and Ray from being silhouetted against the curtain of the glass back door that opened onto the room's fenced and flowery porch.

"Benny, I'm tired."

"I'm sure they'll see reason, Ray."

"About as well as I saw last night's special visitation."

Ray Vecchio had shouted at the Tampa detectives many times in the last six hours, and of course Ray had yelled. Fraser himself had pointed out flaws in reasoning, suggested alternatives, and vouched for Ray Vecchio in every way he could think of.

Over the course of questioning the PD's theory had become clear. They were convinced that Stella Vecchio had been shot by someone other than her husband (there was that mercy). They were sure the killer was known to her husband, but thought he'd identified Victoria as a diversion. They didn't think it impossible that Ray had decided, after the murder, to burn his house for the insurance, perhaps because he was in a hurry to leave the area and needed more liquidity. Since the bowling alley was also an illiquid asset, it was now off-limits to Ray and would be guarded against him and other intruders to whatever limited extent the PD could afford.

Fraser looked at his friend's bowed, vulnerable head and condemned himself heartily for the silence that rose to his lips when he tried to think of something comforting to say.

"Ray, do you need something to eat? I can call Room Service."

"What I need is a lot bigger than my stomach. I need some cop-to-cop loyalty and a tougher lawyer." Ray looked up with a face full of hard intention. "I need Victoria d-- down for the count." He shook his head and turned away. "I need a home and a wife to go home to. I need that a lot, Benny." He looked at Fraser and his eyes only grew sadder. "I need -- what do I need? -- I need to get rid of part of my life. Either the undercover part in Vegas or the Mountie years, I don't always know which but I know they don't both belong in the same lifetime."

Fraser felt he'd been slapped. But, no. He was misinterpreting the words of a grieving man. He could plainly see Ray wasn't attacking him. And yet...

"Have I... disappointed you in some way, Ray?" Oh, no. Surely he hadn't actually said such a maudlin self-centered thing.

"You, Benny? Disappoint me? I did it to myself, I should've known... I didn't say any of that right. Forget about it." Ray withdrew so visibly it made him look as if he'd physically receded.

The door to the hallway rattled. Quickly Fraser stepped to the hinge side of the door, not letting himself block whatever light might be visible in the peephole.

"Who's that?"

"The same guy I was when I left."

Ray's good spirits were jarring but Ray Vecchio relaxed where he sat, very noticeably relieved by the interruption. Fraser, discreditably, felt the same way.

"Your two bags. My one bag. His small-town population of bags." Ray pushed the unloaded luggage cart back into the hall and closed the door.

Fraser covered his hand with a tissue and extracted the dog collar from his bag. "This isn't mine," he said. "Nor is it Dief's."

"She planted it on you." Ray Vecchio rose from his chair to study the collar.

"She's giving ya clues?"

"Threats, I think." More, possibly. Fraser forebore to speculate.

"It's like a message from the Mob. She's telling you she can get to Dief again," Ray said. "That figures. She could hire someone to shoot a wolf easier than a person."

"Dief and Maggie," said Ray flatly, his eyes ice-blue.

"Yes." Fraser explained it to the other Ray. "Dief is staying with my sister Maggie."

"Since when does the lone wolf from the Big Ice have a sister?" Ray seemed surprisingly pleased.

"More precisely, she's my half-sister."

"Half-sister. Half-wolf. Go figure." Ray's widening smile vanished. "And Victoria knows where they live."

"Unless she's bluffing," Ray burst in. "She knows Dief exists, which is not the same as being able to get to him, which is not the same as knowing the true meaning of who he's with."

"She hasn't bluffed in the past," Fraser said.

The already low ambient light in the room abruptly dimmed.

Ray and Ray exchanged glances. "Remind ya of anything?"

The two small lights in the room were still shining at the same candlepower as before. However, the drapes (which were poorly designed for nocturnal light-blocking) no longer glowed with the bright light on the porch outside the glass door.

"They're out there!"

"That way!"

"They've taken out the porch lightbulb."

Ray Vecchio piled suitcases on the bed and crouched behind the bulwark. Ray grabbed his glasses, opened one of the closet's swinging doors as a decoy, then took cover in the bathroom across the hall from the closet. Fraser turned out the room lights, to let eyes adapt to the dark, then stood to the side of the glass door and drew the drapes open. The lightbulb lay unbroken on the drenched porch. No one was there. Correction: no one was visible.

Because nothing in his assessment of these people said 'assassin,' Fraser opened the door.

"Fraser!"

"Frase! Shit!"

"Won't you please come in?"

He was almost sure he could hear human breathing outside, mixed with the rushing sound of traffic and rain. Ray and Ray were no doubt infuriated, as professionals would be, because he had put himself between them and the visitors. He stepped back from the door toward the head of the bed.

He felt a change in the breeze from outdoors and the door slid closed of itself. The drapes followed.

********

Ray heard a man's voice say, "I'm no threat to you."

"Where are you?" Vecchio made a movement noise.

Fraser said nada thing. He was probably standing there with his approachable little smile, sending out Canadian trust-me cooties.

"I'll be sitting down in the wheelchair now," the man said.

"That'll be handy for you," said Vecchio.

Ray took a quick peek around the door-frame at knee level. There was a wide dent in the seat of the wheelchair. Ray leaned out a little and aimed at it.

"Get your ass out where we can see ya!" he said.

"I'd be happier about making myself seen if you'd point the guns a little away from the chair." Mystery man didn't sound comfy. "You might be startled into an accident."

"I don't think you're gonna make us lose our toilet training," Vecchio said coolly.

A big guy in a dripping-wet poncho popped out of thin air. He sat there in the wheelchair, knees apart and hands on knees, leaning forward to accommodate something on his back. He didn't have any expression except body language. Which said, "Hi there, I'm strapped into the Big Chair with somebody reaching for the Big Power Switch. Death with dignity."

"Take the poncho off," Vecchio ordered. He got obedience.

Ray guesstimated Claude Rains the Original Invisible Man as being about forty, maybe six-two, pretty fit. Beat-up backpack. Short-sleeve t-shirt maybe green in a better light, jeans blue. The bottom part of a tattoo showed under each sleeve. Sneakers -- well naturally. Two thin rings on the left ring finger. Neither one looked anything like gold. Steel, maybe? Straight dark hair, shoulder length. Broad solid cheekbones, square jaw, sharp distant dark eyes, skin color somewhere in the Latino category. Kind of tribal-looking, based on Ray's recent northern experience. Kind of impressive-looking, too.

Coldly Vecchio told the guy, "A smart man wouldn't be where you are."

In spite of the threat Claude was watching Fraser, not Vecchio.

"I believe it would reduce the tension--"

"Speak for yourself, Fraser."

"--if you'd let us search your person and your pack, and any other items you might have with you." Fraser cocked his head and looked toward the drapes, listening.

Vecchio stood up, his gun swinging to follow Fraser's gaze. Playing backup, Ray stayed behind cover.

Claude looked around. "I could use some company here," he said. Nothing happened. He looked where Fraser was looking and tapped his chest with his index finger.

"Oh, this doesn't seem wise at all," said a woman's voice. Metcalf's?

Vecchio turned into a hot-eyed statue.

"People who don't have backup don't usually prosper by it." The voice wasn't happy.

Claude tapped his chest again.

Suddenly a woman was standing in front of the drapes. She stripped off her poncho. All her clothes were black, long-sleeve top, pants, sneakers, socks. Wavy dark hair to the shoulders. Long face, dark pretty eyes, straight nose, flat cheeks. Maybe over forty. Caucasian but tanned. No gloves on her hands, two steel-color rings on the left ring finger. A fannypack worn in front.

She did not look even an eyelash like the old photo of Victoria Metcalf.

"Uh, I'm harmless." A little shaky as she looked at Vecchio, and the closet door, and Fraser.

The Mountie reached to take off his Stetson except it was already off. The Big Red One was a little rattled, maybe?

"Really, really non-wise," the woman announced to Claude. "Thank you for setting me up to be body-searched too."

"You're welcome, but thank this man's hearing while you're at it."

"Yes, I did notice."

"I thought you trusted your cards' opinion of the situation." It sounded like Claude was goading her.

"Only about ninety percent. Are you happy with the idea of a one in ten chance of having this go wrong?"

"I was expecting no better than that," setting a whole new blue-ribbon standard for dryness.

Taking his cue from Fraser, who'd stopped looking at anything that wasn't there, Ray walked out into the room.

"I get you two are married," he said loudly, letting his gun muzzle drop, "you can stop the freaking demo."

Vecchio sighed and shifted his weight. It made the light gleam off his automatic, not a bad trick what with the oversupply of dim in the room.

The invisible lady in black glared at Ray defiantly. He glared back coply. She flickered at him. She was there. She was gone. She was there-ing and gone-ing without a motion, like a silent movie with jitters. Then she was there.

"Can you do that at will?" Fraser asked with interest.

"We can," said Claude.

My Friend Flicker nodded, eying Fraser as if he was a Christmas ornament that any minute might start sparking and fuming like a bad wall socket.

"We came here to find out whether we could help you locate the woman who shot Mrs. Vecchio," the man said.

"I'll tell you the problem I have with that," said Vecchio. "You know what happened but I didn't see you there."

"Do you think that proves we were there?" Flicker shot back.

Vecchio ignored her. He gestured with the gun at Claude. "Stand up and take off the pack. Slowly."

"Hey." Ray got Flicker's attention back. "Like gander, like goose. You too. Hand it to the nice Mountie there."

"Mountie?" It looked like a lot less Christmas on her mind now, a lot more fire-danger signs. She started trying to work up the kind of poker face her husband was already good at.

Fraser took her fannypack with a "Thank you kindly," and repeated it for Claude's big pack.

"That wall." Vecchio pointed it out to Claude with a gun twitch. "Lean on it like your life depends on it."

For a moment the man stood there being one of those big Easter Island statues. Then he sent Flicker a look and assumed the position. Vecchio jerked his chin at Ray, meaning, "I apply gun, you apply hands."

Ray holstered his gun and approached the suspect. "Feet further out from the wall."

The man did it.

"That picture-on switch of yours? Keep it on full-time or I swear ya get a kick in the head whether I see it or not."

No weapons, no wallet, no cellphone, no watch. Under the probably-green shirt was a neck chain, probably steel, with a carved wood doodad on it.

He heard Flicker say, "Is there some kind of Canadian national interest involved in this case?"

"Not at all."

"Oh good."

Ray glanced at her. Major Canada mojo must've been at work if she believed Fraser just because he said so. It looked like she mostly had.

He took the chain off over Claude's head, making sure not to catch it on what turned out to be oversize ears. Not Dumbo ears sticking out, just bigger than average.

"Ya wanna explain this?" Ray asked in the voice that said he already knew the guy was guilty.

"It keeps insects from biting."

Ray peered at it. The carving looked like letters but nothing he could read.

"Frase, wouldya turn on some lights?"

"We should leave that up to our visitors." Fraser meant something extra by it, Ray got that, but he meant the politeness even more.

"I'd rather have the light as is." Claude was fast and definite. His wife just nodded, kind of holding her poker-face on with both hands.

Ray tossed the neck-chain to Fraser.

"I don't recognize the symbols," the Mountie said. "Are they a type of ideogram?"

Claude looked over his shoulder. "They're good for magic, not for meaning."

"Magic? Okay, Harry Potter, siddown on the floor over there. You, Invisible Girl, your turn."

Claude and Flicker exchanged looks again, and the man said, "He doesn't tickle."

"Right." Her mouth was thinned down to the vanishing point.

She took her position with a jerky shrug and no verbal complaints, just flinches. Claude eyed Ray's every move. His face was deadpan but he drummed his fingers on the floor now and then.

None of the normal wallet, phone, watch gear on wifey any more than on hubby. Any abnormal gear? Just another neck chain and wood doohickey. He passed it to Fraser, along with a questioning look.

********

The unexpected arrival and the more unexpected offer of help brought many questions to Fraser's mind... but first things first.

"Please excuse the precautions we've had to take," Fraser said, hoping to soothe the indignities the couple had undergone. "But, well, under the circumstances, I'm sure you understand."

The woman looked at her husband (probably her husband) with an expression that was almost more knowing than resentful. Perhaps it was even reminiscent.

"I think we'd have been doing the same, in your position," the man said with exasperation.

Ray and Ray made varying noises of doubt or derision, and Ray Vecchio holstered his semi-automatic.

"It's good of you to say so," Fraser acknowledged. "I believe introductions are in order. But first, would you mind if we all stepped into the bathroom as a counter-surveillance measure?"

Once the door was closed the room was cramped, and felt more so once Ray put the noise generator on low. Fraser set his pocket flashlight behind the shower curtain as a source of dim light and took the position of greatest discomfort, standing in the bathtub. He gestured to the woman to take the only available seat. Her husband, his face just perceptibly amused, squeezed into the space beside her. Both the Rays stayed out of the tub. Fraser was grateful Ray hadn't joined him; past associations would've been most distracting.

"I'm Constable Benton Fraser of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police -- this is Detective Ray Kowalski of the Chicago Police Department -- and this is Ray Vecchio, who till recently held the same rank in the same service. I've been a partner to both of them while I was on liaison duty in Chicago, and I can recommend them to you as officers of high integrity and ability."

Strangely, of the two Rays it was Ray Vecchio who looked down in embarrassment or unease. Ray simply gave Fraser a small upwards nod which in Rayspeak meant, "OK, now you got all that off your chest."

"And your names are?"

"Roland." He reached to shake Fraser's pro-offered hand.

"Vee." She shook hands without lingering over it.

"Only one name to a customer, huh?" Ray began the necessary probing.

"As of now we don't know whether you're more of a risk to us than the killer is," said Vee, chin out. "So don't expect us to give our real names."

"Do ya think this is a game?" Ray came back. "Hey! Quicksand! High voltage! Biohazard! Here is not a playground for invisible people." Ray had only slid one of his feet forward an inch, but Vee pushed herself back till her spine hit the front of the toilet tank. Ray said, less loudly but more grittily, "Lock your games away, bury them deep, burn the shovel."

Roland stepped in front of his wife. "Provoking, isn't she?"

He smiled as he spoke, but he was clearly ready for something more combative. Apparently he was only "at home" to intimidation if it involved a gun. Behind him, Vee looked as though she'd rather chop off her own feet than back away again.

"You said you wanted to help us out," Ray Vecchio said suddenly. "It's a funny thing, I never heard that breaking and entering was the best way to do that."

A snort came from Roland. "I know that's the legal term for what we did last night, but we broke nothing."

"Except one or two laws, but hey, what does that mean to a guy with your talents?"

"It means enough to us that we'd planned to leave no mark on your bowling alley or you." He looked at Ray's bruised face, and Ray Vecchio's. His dark eyebrows twitched.

"What type of help are you offering?" Fraser asked.

"In the best case I might be able to locate the killer for you with spellwork. It's more likely I won't be able to, in which case I think I might be bait to bring her in."

"A spell," said Ray. "Once again magic rears its funny head. Okay, let's see the whole bibbetty-bobbetty-boo, wave your wand, hocus the pocus."

"Are you sure you want what you're asking for? I've cast spells to read Mr. Vecchio's memories, once to find out about the killing, when I saw the first news story about the atrocity, and once more tonight to find out whether the killer had attacked him again, when I saw police cars at the alley. And I've cast spells to knock both of you out, you twice and Mr. Vecchio once. Which of those spells are you wanting?"

"What do you want? That's the million-dollar question on my mind," Ray Vecchio said. His face was cold and controlled, Fraser saw with disappointment. "I guess you want me to believe you know all about what went down that night, but you also want me to believe you aren't the shooter's accomplices. Yeah, I've heard urban legends in my time."

Vee was watching him with evident alarm. "This isn't going to work," she said quietly to her husband.

"We already made the mistake of stopping halfway once," Roland told her over his shoulder. "I'd like to learn from our mistakes."

"I'd rather learn without any more of them." Her gaze met Fraser's briefly, then fell. "I have Tarot cards with me," she said to him. "I'd like to use them to check something now, if you don't mind."

"Certainly."

He found the deck in a velvet bag in her fannypack, together with (he noted) a tube of super-glue and another of glue solvent, as well as a few less unusual tools such as pocket knife and first-aid kit. There was no flashlight. Respecting the usual custom of cartomancers, he examined the deck without touching it except through the velvet.

Ray passed the bag to Vee.

"Somewhere private I can do this?" She looked around.

"Out of our line of sight? Not a chance," said Ray suspiciously. He shook his head at Fraser's silent disapprobation.

"The floor around the corner there would do fine, and you can keep an eye on me if you want to be sure I'm not up to something. Just don't stare at me or talk to me while I'm shuffling."

"Ray, might I make a suggestion? Our room on the third floor would be less crowded, if you're willing to escort Vee up there for the time being. As well, it would be a better counter-surveillance measure. We only have three headsets for use here."

Ray brushed his thumb against the side of his nose. Obviously he grasped Fraser's suggestion that they separate the two visitors for questioning.

Vee threw her husband an anxious look.

"I assure you, Ray can be a perfect gentleman," said Fraser hastily.

"I'll be holding you to that," Roland said with full seriousness. "Call me when you get there," rallying his wife.

She smiled, very briefly, and followed Ray out.

********

Without looking away from the closed door his wife had just gone through, Roland started to speak.

"Hold off there," Ray told him. He handed the man a headset.

"How does this..?"

Fraser explained it in his one-of-a-kind Fraser way while they got set up out in the main part of the room. Roland took the counter-surveillance measures in stride, which said something about his past.

Roland asked, "Do you have any forensic samples from the killer? Hair would be fine."

"Nah. They didn't find any blood from her wound, either," said Ray.

Roland swung around in surprise. "Was she injured? I never saw a sign."

"Bingo."

The expression on Roland's face said that Ray was way overdue for a slow-learners award. "I'm happy I passed your test but I'd been thinking the notes I already left you were proof. If you have a sample of her that I can touch, I can give you more proof by finding her wherever she is. One hair would be enough."

Ray thought quickly. Was this a scam to get the forensic samples, keep them from being tested and revealing something? Maybe something medical? It didn't make sense. Roland couldn't count on getting every single one of the samples by asking for so little.

"I'm afraid we don't have anything," said Fraser regretfully.

"It's something I really can do. Try searching the house again."

"What house?" Ray asked, bitter.

"Your house," Roland said impatiently. Ray scanned him for a lie and didn't see a clue to one.

"Ray's house burned down this afternoon," explained Fraser.

"Lord, no." Roland's fists clenched. "That's too much." Ray read it as anger -- no, wrath was a closer word. It wasn't a lot like pity. "Did she set the fire?"

"Am I correct in guessing that without some corporeal tie to her, you can't read her memories to find her?" It was Fraser's turn to push.

"It can't be done."

"I know her birth name. Would that help to find her?"

Roland's mouth was tight. "I need to have touched her or a sample of her. Names are no more use than photos or voodoo dolls for aiming this kind of spell."

"This kind?" asked Fraser.

"The reliable kind."

"Is your spell-casting kit in your pack?"

"Part of it is."

"May I take a look?"

********

Vee stopped on the threshold as if the room's floor was made out of tissue paper.

"First one foot, then the other. Or both at once if you're feeling jumpy," said Ray.

She huffed and made a beeline to the desk and the phone.

"Slow down, stop moving that hand. Whaddaya trying to do?"

"Roland asked me to call him, so I am. Why, does this mess up your interrogation plans?"

"Does the cord reach the bathroom?" Holy shit, it did. Must be the special hotel service for traveling salesmen with the trots. "In here. Lemme..." He punched in the room number. "Frase, she wants to talk to hubby."

"Why, certainly."

Ray handed the receiver to the invisible girl, pulled the curtains closed, and started turning on lights. He took a good look at her to fill in the color notes he hadn't been able to get in the twilight downstairs. All-black clothes, check. Makeup, none. Right. Who would an invisible woman put on a show for? Hair, either sun-faded black or really dark brown. Eyes, blue, a few shades darker than Frase's. A tawny tan, in fact she was a little weathered-looking.

"Roland... I'm in room three-fourteen... That's right..." She shrugged. "So far so good... As the man said, right... Okay, bye."

She looked at the five lights he'd turned on. They pretty much brightened up the whole room, and the bathroom was the brightest spot of all.

"You want it darker?" He hadn't figured out Fraser's lead, but he had years of practice on how to follow.

"No." She bit her lip, looking weaselly. "If it makes you feel more at ease." Saying it with almost a jeer, like she thought he was scared of the dark.

He ignored the needle. "What was that 'as the man said' thing?"

"Oh? The old joke. What did the man say as he fell past the fiftieth floor of the Empire State?"

"Gotcha." He turned on the water in the tub and watched Vee tighten up. "Hey, I gotta question."

"Imagine that."

"Why'd you turn the power off?"

"Last night? Call it belt and suspenders. Invisibility is all very well but there are still a few visual give-aways, like the way we stir up dust when we move. Those are harder to notice in the dark."

Something hinky about the way her smoothness level went up.

"Why'd you decide to wear black tonight?"

"Belt and suspenders and skyhooks too."

"Is it a precaution against a breakdown? You afraid your personal TV screen is gonna warm up and the picture'll come back on?"

"Don't get your hopes up, boyo," Vee said, turning snappish again. "Look, I'd like to read the cards and go back down."

"Nobody's stopping you."

"You actually mean you'll walk me back down there as soon as I'm done with the reading? That's strange, I thought you bringing me up here was the good old divide-and-conquer cop game, like the good-cop-bad-cop game you three were playing before."

"Ya mean, like the good-suspect-bad-suspect game Roland and you were playing?"

Her mouth quirked. "We weren't playing."

"Right back at ya."

********

Fraser seemed fascinated with the pane of glass that Roland said was his bargain-basement crystal ball. It had a shallow dish polished into the middle and a pick-up-sticks bunch of lines scratched around the dish.

Benny's nostrils flared. God, he was so beautiful, so fine. It made Ray feel furious, and lost, and a few other words he had to slam the dictionary shut on because they weren't good for his business in the real world. He suspected he wouldn't have to keep his grip on that book for long. Victoria hadn't needed much time to do her dirty work the last time. A few more days and then Fraser would leave with Kowalski. All over here -- nothing to see, folks.

Instead of watching Benny, Ray stared ominously at Roland.

"Salviae sclareae oleum, oil of clary sage," Fraser said. "The herb is reputed to cleanse the eyes and improve the vision, though I wouldn't recommend the undiluted essential oil for that purpose. Illicii veri semen, seed of Chinese star anise, supposed to induce true dreams and visions. Both traces are fairly fresh."

"It's from this evening," Roland said.

"Do you have everything you need to demonstrate your spell?"

"I do," Roland said. "I've touched both of you and I could read either of your memories, or for that matter Detective Kowalski's. But I won't cast the scrying spell for a demonstration. It's as intrusive as peeking through a keyhole into someone's soul. I won't cast it unless it might save a life."

Ray saw a chance to grab his end of the whipsaw. "Sure you'd be saving a life. Yours. How long do you think you'd survive in a prison?"

"That's a meaningless question." Something about the way Roland set his feet reminded Ray about the man's size. Hey, the bigger they come.

"We've got battery, breaking and entering, obstruction of justice."

"He's been assisting in enquiries, Ray."

"Not till we know where he was when Stella was shot." Ray turned back to Roland and said exactly what he was going to keep believing till he heard something better than M-for-Magic-TV. "You were in my home when my wife was murdered."

"No. I was paying a visit halfway across town." He didn't look relieved the way a guy with an alibi ought to. That had to mean one of three things -- lie alibi, sex out of bounds alibi, or alibi who knew his real name.

"Want to tell me where?"

Roland sat down at the desk, wrote a name and address in tidy square printing, and gave the note to Ray along with a dark narrow warning glare. "This woman's sister has terminal liver cancer. Vee and I were doing the sister's housework. It's too late to call now, she'll be sleeping. When you do call, don't be distressing her."

Fraser took the note out of Ray's hand, giving him the polite little thank-you nod. Ray ignored anything about it that might be a hint about good manners and glared at Roland. In the back of his mind something about cancer and healing magic and dying people was trying to gel into a big toxic lump, but it didn't have to get there unless he started believing something, or maybe anything, this guy said.

"Am I the source of distress here?" Ray demanded. "Did I break in at the lanes? Am I the one who confessed to knocking out a cop? Am I the one who's playing games with guilty knowledge of a homicide?"

"I've never been at your home or near it. Neither has Vee. We're not connected to your wife's murder, except that I'm a psychic witness."

The most infuriating thing was that it looked like Fraser believed it.

********

Vee started to stick her Tarot cards back into her deck.

"Ah ah ah, don't touch that dial." Ray looked at the cards. Pretty little pictures, clear as mud.

Vee inhaled a breath and let it out as hard as a curseword. Not much like her attitude a few minutes ago. She'd been shuffling and cutting and looking serene as a cat in the sun. Ray reached down to pick up the middle card from the tub edge. She shoved his hand away with the back of hers.

"Don't touch my cards." She let a breath in and out again. "I have a kind of superstition about that. What are you up to? Humor the flake to get her to talk?"

"Don't people who do Tarot cards have something like, like some kinda professional code of ethics? Somebody asks a question, you hafta answer?"

See if it was a chance to get into her head. You took them where you could find them.

Vee examined him thoroughly, the first time he'd seen her pay attention to him except for don't-hurt-me attention. Which didn't count, it only came in the decorator colors of fight or flight. She frowned up at him as if she'd been making a mistake.

"Maybe that is part of the deal," she said slowly. "I don't know for sure but it'd make sense. It hasn't come up before because I only do this for us."

"Is that middle card Stella? Mrs. Vecchio?"

Three cards in a row. The center card was a beautiful blonde woman pouring water out of two pitchers at once. It was labeled at the bottom, 'The Star.'

"The victim? Why -- oh, stella, star. No. I was asking about Constable Fraser because he's a new factor since my last reading, and having a foreign government involved worries me. That card, that's what he really wants to be to other people."

"Spilling water on them?"

"It's a good card," she snapped. "It's Hope. You couldn't do much better." She almost smiled. "So I've been told. The other cards, they're the reality check, what Fraser actually is to other people. Three other people, at least. This one," she pointed at the end card, "is what Fraser is to Roland and me."

The Queen of Swords, it said. The lady in the picture had one big freaking sword. It made him wonder how big a sword the King had.

"Sharp, straight, and fair. Also upright. It's a good card for a detective, so that's all right."

"That one looks bad." Ray pointed at the first card, a big red cartoon heart with three swords stuck right through it. "How bad is it?"

"What it looks like."

"Who?"

"What Fraser is to the killer. I thought it might drop a hint about why a Canadian is on this case, but no."

"Wait a minute. It's what it looks like? It looks like a broken heart. This says Fraser broke Metcalf's heart? No way to the n-th power."

"No, it doesn't look like a broken heart." Vee didn't sound bothered or contrary. "If the connection between them were as deeply emotional as all that, it'd be a cups card. There's something harder and colder in this kind of suffering. Something intractable -- the swords can't be pulled out. The heart has to beat its way free a little at a time."

She was starting to come off like a phony. Or like a little girl telling herself a story, wrapping herself up in it, letting it come to her as she went along.

"I hate when that happens."

"It's tricky," she went on, glancing up at him without hostility, "because the cards are double-tongued, they usually say two or three things at the same time. This one ought to be what the Constable is to her, since that's what I asked. But it could mean what she is to him, too, the cards are like that. It's a three card and that could add another meaning. Third time's the charm. Third time pays for all."

Ray didn't know which he wanted to do more, get in her face or back away quietly.

********

"Why would she be after you?" Ray Vecchio pressed. "Was it more of your mind-reading? Some of the unenlightened masses might be hypersensitive about having you crawl around in their heads, believe it or not."

"I can't cast any spell on her right at present," Roland said, his strongly-marked eyebrows closing together. "And though it's intrusive it isn't true mind-reading. The spell puts me in touch with your memories of the one particular event I ask about and nothing but that. I was seeing it though your eyes and hearing it through your ears. I have no idea what you were thinking or feeling. As for why she might be pursuing me, she could know about our invisibility. We could have been more discreet about where we faded and unfaded."

"Did you ever talk to her?"

"Before the killing, I'd seen her only at the end of the hall in the service wing or partway across the central parking lot."

Fraser marked the phrases that suggested familiarity with the facilities. It fitted with his previous speculation.

"You only saw her twice? In the distance?" Ray's eyebrows arched. "But when you saw her on your magic boob tube, you were sure it was the same woman. What made her look so familiar? Had she been shooting people in the hospital too?"

"Her face is hard to forget." Roland's face was deadpan, strictly factual. His fingers drummed a riff on the desktop.

"That happens when you've been exchanging up-close and personal endearments."

"I'd sooner be having a broken-glass enema." It was said with a slightly curling lip.

"Hey, that's colourful. I wonder why it sounds like maybe a slight exaggeration. Maybe because she's sunk her hooks into better men than you."

Fraser flinched.

Roland didn't. Nor did he look at Fraser, only at Ray. "I saw what she did to you and your wife through your own eyes."

"You said you only found out she was a killer last week. So did you prefer broken glass to unforgettable even before then?"

Roland looked up at Ray Vecchio as if the world had never contained such an outrageous example of a man hit with the stupid stick.

Ray smiled confidently but not widely. "What about seeing her last night, after you knew she was a killer? Did you try to chase her down?" It invited a lie.

"I didn't." Roland's eyes became more distant but Fraser could see regret in them.

"Did you call the cops right away?"

"No, I didn't." Still no lie.

"Why not? Were you protecting yourself or her?"

Grimly, "I was thinking she might be in the Mafia. I was protecting us from the backlash."

"The people she shot had an Italian name and she looked Mediterranean, at least to you, so she had to be Mob. Nice way to stereotype, Rollie."

Roland's eyes flashed. "I'll admit it."

He and Ray Vecchio locked stares. Fraser read what he could in both of them.

Roland, he thought, was authentic. He had a great deal to protect. It wasn't clear exactly how much was on his plate or how far he'd go.

Ray showed signs of suspecting Roland wasn't a criminal. For one thing, he hadn't called the PD. His fierceness probably came from resentment or denial of the very idea that his mind might have been invaded.

"Victoria Metcalf is, in fact, of Greek origin through both her natural parents," Fraser commented. "Her mother remarried after her father's death."

Ray laughed cynically. "Wonder who he died of?"

"She was only twelve at the time." But she'd been sixteen when her stepfather killed himself...

Roland sighed, drummed fingers, and looked steadily at Fraser. "No one would ever think, hearing all this, that I came here of my own free will to help you," he challenged.

"Yes, you did, and it's much appreciated. But I'm sure you recognise anonymity can be a weapon as well as a shield."

"It's a shield we have to have. Unfortunately."

Fraser nodded. "We understand that. We've certainly seen such cases before. Do you remember Garret, Ray?" Ray began to shake his head slowly; Fraser knew it wasn't a failure of memory. He explained to Roland, "Garret, a clairvoyant, was at some risk of being jailed when he tried to help find a kidnapped girl, Mary Ann Madison. His predicament was complicated by his possession of physical evidence, the young lady's locket. After two admittedly rather anxious days he was cleared of all suspicion..."

Then he noticed Ray's face. Storm clouds were lowering.

"Fraser, for future reference, you only have to use four words to say 'I told you so.'"

"Ray, that wasn't my intent. The Madison case showed that in the long run an innocent witness can't be scapegoated." Fraser looked at their prisoner and truly hoped this wary man could be brought to see his best interest. "Roland, you can't depend on your anonymity. Weren't you employed at Tampa Central and the Moffitt Cancer Centre when you saw Victoria Metcalf in those locations?"

Roland's pause was an admission. Even if he kept silence on this point, his appearance was almost as individual and recognizable as Victoria's. Only a very little questioning at the facilities would be needed to provide his name.

That is, if the questioning could be handled in a way that didn't come to the PD's attention prematurely.

"I was," Roland said.

"The only firm date he gave for either of the early sightings was a Friday," Fraser said off-handedly to Ray. "Being a payday, it would be more memorable to someone who was an employee."

The almost excessive forcefulness Ray Vecchio had been bringing to bear on Roland subsided a little when he looked at Fraser. In fact, he looked almost nostalgic. "Good one, Benny."

"Thank you kindly. Roland, with respect to your first sighting -- can you cast a spell on yourself to recall the exact date?"

"I can't."

"And you claim you can't view Metcalf's memories the way you viewed mine," said Ray more fiercely than before.

"I can't because I haven't any sample of her and I haven't touched her."

"So you say."

"You jackass," Roland said loudly.

"You're protecting her."

"I wouldn't if I could."

"Yeah, Rollie, that's the million-dollar question right there. What can that old black magic do?" He asked the question with ferocity that showed in his face even though the en/decryption wiped it from his broadcast voice. "You can make yourself invisible. You say you can read other people's memories too, so what else can you do?" Ray's hand brushed against his stomach.

Roland could have been a statue seated like Ozymandias except that he spoke. "I don't know any spell that'll do anything to help catch the murderer. Isn't that the real million-dollar question?"

********

Vee sat with her legs curled back around the side of the toilet seat. Ray decided against the tactic of looming over her. He perched on the edge of the tub, legs crossed ankle over knee. Since his sneaker was right there he re-tied it, taking his time.

"People don't get involved. Big question -- why did you?"

"Because we aren't people, maybe?"

"Why'd ya deal yourselves into this instead of calling the cops?"

"Would they believe Roland's a psychic? Or would they hang us up as murder accomplices?"

"Kinda depends on your alibi for that night."

She told him all about it. If it was as good as she made it sound, it would hold. Also she was protected for this past afternoon at fire time -- working on a computer in an office, employer not named, but once he got the name out of her it'd be an easy check. Roland, she said, had been doing janitorial work today. Not so bulletproof. Janitors might as well be invisible, har har, so it'd be hard to get much from witnesses.

He'd swear on Ben that she wasn't faking the confusion when he asked about this afternoon, or the shock when he said about the fire.

"Too bad, so sad." Time to loom. Ray stood up, stuck his thumbs in his pockets. "Ya got yourselves into this mess. Those messages of yours didn't do jack to help our case. Anonymous crap is a freak-up factor, not an assist. If ya really had alibis ya shoulda gone straight to the PD."

"Oh no. No thank you." She stood up. "We can't afford the attention. Look, we sneak and we spy and we're oh so good at it. That's all I can say for invisibility and memory-reading. If the police know we can do any of that, the government knows too. Right? If the police and government know, so does the Mafia, right? Once the news spreads, all the wrong people are going to want to own us."

"One does already, is what Fraser thinks."

"Metcalf?" The idea didn't seem to surprise her. "Why does he think so? Because he knows she's Mafia? Or is she a government agent, maybe?"

"Now I get the picture! Yay me!" He spread his arms. "Vecchio had cop know-how without the drawback of being on the force. Ya wanted him to owe ya so he'd do the dirty work of catching up with Metcalf. That's why the special-delivery messages, that's why ya healed him."

"No! We wanted..." She sounded wronged, okay, that sounded good, that sounded real. "Wait a minute. We healed him?" Phony surprise, if he'd ever seen it.

Soft spot, hello. Now to start pushing on it.

********

"I must agree with him, Ray," Fraser said earnestly, "the extent of his abilities isn't a question of the first importance."

"I respectfully disagree with you, Fraser. It's the most important thing in the universe. Why is being bait the only thing he can do to help us? Why doesn't he cast a spell to haul Victoria in here and drop her right here on my feet?"

"This is no Hollywood magic." Roland's voice was raised far enough to make his scorn audible above the noise shield.

"Logically, Ray, it's impossible to prove a negative. You can't very well expect him to prove what he can't do, only what he can."

"He's refused to do that too, hasn't he? So, what if the tables turn, like right around through a one-eighty? Instead of him being bait to bring her to us, he brings us to her." Ray took a step toward Roland, who stood up. "You. Mr. Modern Merlin. Why help me? Out of all the gunshot victims in all the hospitals in the world, you pick me -- and you come back three times even though you have a mad passion for staying out of sight. Why?"

"It can be hard to remember why I'd want to help you," Roland said, stone-faced again. Fraser thought his tone, if discernible, would have been very dry. "The news said you'd lost your memory and your wife's killer was unknown. He could've walked into the room with you and you'd never have known him. I was thinking that if you were told what'd happened, the hint might help you recall it for yourself and then there'd be no need for our direct involvement. Once I cast the memory-reading spell, I recognised the killer and we knew secrecy wasn't a good choice any more. But we never had an epiphany on that. We realised by steps."

Fraser could believe that. He wondered how long a habit of self-isolation Roland was breaking.

"I notice how none of that sounded like an apology for the head invasion." Ray's eyes had a green glare like a cat's.

Roland studied him and asked, like a physician, "Did your memory come back?"

"Like gangbusters." Ray's lips drew back in a snarling smile. "Why did you fix this?" He slapped himself on the stomach.

The other man stood mute, but resettled his feet as though an ebbing wave was sucking the sand from beneath them.

Ray said, "Think about all the places you worked. Did you ever hear of any kind of surgery healing up," he snapped fingers, "like that?"

"No."

"Yeah? I've heard some urban legends right there on the TV in my room. Big news about medical miracles. What do you think of all that, Rollie?"

"I haven't investigated. I don't know how much is true."

"You didn't need to investigate. You already knew, didn't you?" Ray said it with a look that seemed oddly vindictive.

"I'm here to try to catch the woman you say is named Victoria Metcalf. I'm not here for any other topics."

"What kind of work do you do in hospitals?"

"I'm an orderly at Moffitt Cancer Centre and sometimes I make in-home visits for the hospices."

"Have you ever worked at St. Joseph's Hospital?"

"Not since the end of March. Why do you want to know?"

Ray laughed shortly. "I moonlight for the IRS."

"On the night of February nineteenth, a patient at St. Joseph's Hospital was healed of a broken back, many broken bones, and other injuries with no visible intervention," Fraser interjected.

"Have you ever worked at Tampa General?" Ray persisted.

"Not since June thirtieth."

"On the night of May fourteenth, a patient at Tampa General was healed of third-degree burns over forty percent of his body, again for no apparent reason."

"How many hospitals or hospices have you worked for, Rollie?"

"I've been employed at most of what the Tampa Bay area has to offer. Why are you wanting to give me the credit for those healings?"

"They happened during your time of employment," Fraser explained.

"That's not a pattern." Roland rolled his shoulders.

"In your dreams," Ray said. "Or maybe I should say, in mine. Because on the night of August fifteenth I dropped down dead to the world and I woke up with the hole in my guts missing. You were there when that happened. What's the point of pretending you didn't do it? What are you trying to hide from me?"

No answer.

"What else can you do?"

No answer at all.

"How far does it go?"

Roland stayed quiet, breathing faster. Until now he'd been glancing at Fraser occasionally. The message, which wasn't precisely an accusation, was distinct -- 'You're still letting this go on?' Now, though, his attention was fixed on Ray.

Ray's voice rose further. "Can you raise the dead?"

Roland said, and it was clearly an avowal, "If I knew a spell that would do that, I'd never cast it."

"Yeah?" That was a shout. "I guess you must be real proud of yourself for that."

He shoved Roland hard against the wall, tilting a nearby framed picture, and held him there. Roland stared down at Ray in what had to be genuine outrage and frustration, and then caught Fraser's eyes. 'I can't,' this look said.

"If I ever find out you were there that night and you didn't save my Stella," Ray said in a bitingly quiet voice, "I'll kill you."

"Were you born to be an idiot?" yelled Roland, pushing Ray away with both hands. "Or have you been sucking down too many painkillers?"

He moved away from the wall, spun when Ray seized the back of his t-shirt, knocked Ray's hands away. His headset fell down around his neck. Fraser jumped in to obstruct the two men.

"Ray. Roland. Ray. Please. This will attract attention none of us want."

Ray was pale as ivory, his eyes dry and shadowed. Roland was flushed and urgent, his mouth twisted with bitter impatience. He donned the headset again; the fact that he did it almost reflexively was telling.

"I wasn't there. And you saw her injuries as well as I did," Roland said directly to Ray, spreading his hands as if an explanation might fall into them. "You know the amount of brain damage. A spell could heal the meat of the brain, but the nerve connections that serve memory and personality, those... they're unique, they aren't... they can't be remade except by living them all over again. And bringing her back to life -- how could anyone who isn't the Son of God do that? I don't have the authority to summon a soul back!"

They stood and looked at each other, and Fraser could feel the shift. For his part, he became sure, at that moment, that they all three were professionals in a field where everything they could do wasn't necessarily enough... and where they sometimes failed too miserably for words. He suspected Ray was having much the same realization.

Ray was quelled. He groaned and turned his face to the wall and began to breathe hard.

"I didn't really believe it," he said.

"It was a reasonable extrapolation." Fraser put his hand on Ray's shoulder. "It's a great pity it couldn't be true." He could feel Ray quieting under the touch as quickly as Dief did when he was asleep with his legs and ears twitching in nightmare.

"I'll do what I can do," said Roland. He was watching Ray not quite with sympathy but certainly with empathy.

"Are you the only one who can heal people?" asked Fraser. "Your wife can't?"

"She can't."

Ray turned to face them again. His colour and breathing had improved. Roland's expression turned dry again.

"You healed me," Ray said to Roland.

"I cast a spell that healed you." Roland's tone, Fraser strongly suspected, was acerbic.

"Tomayto, tomahto."

"Ray, I suspect the distinction would be between possessing a power and possessing knowledge."

Roland smiled a little. "The real difference is between being possessed and possessing."

"You fixed this." Ray settled his hand on his stomach. "Say it straight out like a man."

"I did."

"Thanks."

The two of them tried to stare each other down for a moment. Then Ray put out his hand. Roland shook it.

He said, "My name is David Thorne -- usually Dram, for a nickname, not David. My wife's name is Ivy Thorne."

********

Fraser just barely opened the door, turned on the light switches, and squished through the ajarness. He held his Stetson out in front of him. Ray followed, admiring Fraser's ass and laughing at him without making any noise about it.

"Merely a precaution, Ray."

"Ya think light keeps the in-- them away?" Shit, they should've brought the headsets and shit so they could talk. Not like Vecchio needed the equipment down there by himself.

"It's consistent with our observations to date."

Ray made use of the mirror he was standing next to. Whoopee. The bruises on his face were still magically healed, all gone. Reality sure wasn't what it used to be.

"Fairy gold, Ray?" Ben half-smiled at him.

"Who ya calling a fairy?"

"It was always said that any gold the Fairy Folk gave to mortals would turn into dead leaves and ashes by morning."

"Okay then. Life hands me a pumpkin at midnight, which it's two minutes to, I'll make pumpkin pie."

"That's an admirable philosophy."

"Takes one to know one." Ray grinned at Ben, then sent the bathroom door a dagger look. "You know what, I hate bathrooms now."

"They aren't optional, Ray."

"The hate isn't optional either."

Door closed, water running.

"Do you trust the Thornes, Frase? Because they're blipping on my weird-o-meter so hard my hinky-o-meter is drowned out."

"I trust they want Victoria caught, and I trust they won't turn on us. I'm not entirely sanguine about whether they'll respect the law."

"No fucking kidding."

Fraser didn't pop back at him about it. He was pondering. So Ray did some of that too.

The healing spell, sure, it had worked, but it was a major nada-much. A little bit of his and Vecchio's blood which Dram Thorne had burned up when he was done, poof, ashes ashes all fall down. Some herbs, some candles, some rhythmic word-like noises. Fraser said it was in the something pent ammeter language, but it didn't mean anything to him judging by the line between his eyebrows. The earth didn't move, the air didn't fill up with colored lights and woo-woo. Hollywood witches and the voodoo people had it over the Thornes in spades for style.

But. The reliable kind of magic. Bruise-be-gone.

"She didn't say word one about the healing." Ray snorted. Talk about shoot-herself-in-the-foot behavior. "It was like she just taped her mouth shut with invisible tape. But when he caved he really caved. Frase, I bet it was the same way with those healings he did that coulda got him caught. And with healing Vecchio at the same time he left him a note. Like he wanted to get it all found out."

Fraser didn't answer for a moment.

"Yes. I suspect he did. Isolation will drive a man to strange things."

Ben's eyes were focused inside somewhere and his mouth turned down glumly. The Thornes weren't really everyone he'd been thinking about.

"Yeah," Ray said gently, "I hear that, through and through. Hey." Ben looked outward at him now, face as serious as a child's. Ray promised, "Ben Fraser -- lonely no more."

Ben kissed him like tenderness, kissed him like devotion, but the thing was? This sci-fi force-field weirdness in between them, down below the neck. Ray wasn't the one generating it, that was for sure. He wasn't the one who pulled back, either.

"Ray," Ben said, "don't think that I want to keep you at arm's length. But right now... I think that I... I can't fathom her cruelty, Ray."

It was the quietest cry Ray had ever heard.

"You don't hafta. You do not go there." Ray thought about drowning. "Fathoms are what they use to measure deep water, right? You stay up on top of it where you belong, Ben. Keep away from the fish things with eyes that glow in the dark because they never had any light. Bloom, close, kick 'em in the head."

"It's far too late for that." Ben tipped his head down to let his forehead rest on Ray's.

********

Fraser almost couldn't hear Ray in the shower except for the occasional thump and murmur. Surely he was working out how to ask about Victoria.

Well, it would have to be spoken of. No, the passive voice was an evasion; he, Benton Fraser, would have to speak of it. He would have to do it freely and willingly (a paradox) so that Ray couldn't feel he was taking advantage by asking.

Fraser pulled aside a curtain and looked out the broad window. The rain had stopped and there was certainly no snow. There was no excuse for his briefly mistaking the dim yellowish and orange glints of streetlights for the reflections of candle flames inside the room. It was simply self-indulgence.

Victoria was out there as surely as she had been in Chicago and he had no real idea of how to hunt her without using innocents as bait.

What would he have to do to make this end?

...sheer plod makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

There was advice for him, if he liked. A sonnet that glorified devotion and self-sacrifice and found them lovely even at their most mundane. Was that really what Victoria had recited at Fortitude Pass, too softly for him to consciously grasp? Perhaps he'd never understood what she was saying at all. Perhaps he'd overlaid his own hopes on his memory, as a way to tie himself to her.

Fraser looked at the bag where the collar was hidden. The collar was large enough for Diefenbaker's neck, so it would fit his own as well. Could that be the only message she'd meant to send? The question would certainly bear more examination. Well, he'd faxed to Maggie this afternoon, and informed his superior officer and hers as well. They should all be aware by now that Victoria hadn't given up yet, that anyone he knew could be a hostage.

The Thornes. He'd warned them of her methods too. He and they and the two Rays had made contingency plans as best they might, but he felt as if he were driving a dog-team with a harness made of knitting yarn. Perhaps that was only another manifestation of his obsession, his single-mindedness, or his arrogance, to think that because Victoria's escape had been his responsibility he had to be in control of her recapture.

But, oh God, he was sure of the only right way to do it and he wasn't sure of Ray Vecchio or the Thornes.

Fraser found he was standing over his baggage.

"Hey, Frase!" Ray called.

Fraser went to the bathroom door and winced at the hot humidity that made him clammy almost immediately. Ray, toweling his body violently, shook his blond head. Light seemed to spatter instead of water. Involuntarily Fraser smiled.

"Frase, why do they put peacocks in cemeteries?"

A safe question, even intriguing. "It might be a symbolic contrast. The peacock has always represented vanity, at least in Western cultures, but the grave ends all pretensions."

Ray's eyebrows did something skeptical. Fraser considered the post-mortem evidence from his own family.

"It's said to, at least. Ah, at any rate there's a famous epitaph, As you are now, so once was I. As I am now, you soon must be."

"Nyah nyah nyah." Ray picked up the canister of hair gel as if he was going to re-spike his hair, reconsidered, set it down.

"What?"

"Doesn't it sound like that to you?"

"There could be an element of Schadenfreude."

"Language, Fraser. English this time."

"Gloating over the misfortunes of another, especially if the sufferer had previously been more fortunate than oneself."

"Yeah." He tightened the towel around his hips, settled himself against the counter, and looked Fraser hard in the eye. "Brings us right back to Victoria, huh?"

It seemed Ray had been using an interrogator's ploy.

Fraser thought quickly. On the personal level, Ray's trust in him was not built as firmly as it someday would be, as firmly as it needed to be for this... But if he didn't answer now, he was afraid he'd hear Ray's hopes begin to collapse.

"If you wish."

"I wish, okay? C'mon."

Ray stepped business-like past Fraser, caught his hand, drew him along, and turned off the main light as they went.

He sat on the bed, patted the spot beside him, and asked, "Okay?"

Fraser sat and his hand slipped up to his eyebrow. The pressure didn't make his face relax this time; but, he realised, the gesture gave him a way to avoid looking Ray in the eye. He'd never spoken about Victoria face to face, not to anyone.

Ray said "huh" softly to himself, then lay back, rolled, lunged sideways across the bed till he could reach as far as the bedside light. It clicked off. For a moment Fraser felt Ray's gaze cutting through the darkness and resting on him. Then the bed quaked once more and Ray was sitting back to back with him, a warm, solid, knobby pressure.

Silence began to open up.

Ray said, "You don't hafta."

"I'm afraid I do." Fraser straightened and looked at the curtain. "The bank robbery for which she and her partner were later convicted had been in Alaska. Jolly Hughes fled south, the second man died, and Victoria came into Canada above the 62nd parallel in a light airplane. After it was forced down by the weather, the pilot chose to leave her there. I tracked her into a place called Fortitude Pass. The storm had been blowing for days--"

Ray grunted; of course their Northern travels had shown him what that could mean.

"--and by the time I found her I'd lost everything, my pack and my supplies. She was crouched in a niche on the lee side of a mountain. She was almost frozen. Almost dead. I staked a lean-to with my rifle and draped my coat around it. I used my body to cover her against the storm while it closed in around us. I kept talking to her to keep her from slipping away.

"It snowed for a day and a night and a day, and when I couldn't talk any more I told her to talk to me, I forced her to talk. About anything. I remember being aware that I was delirious and dying, but I could hear her voice. I was sure she was reciting a poem over and over. I never made out the words. It became... as though I had known her forever. It could have been a thousand lifetimes, but they all kept doubling back to Fortitude Pass.

"One day after the storm finally broke, we found my pack and ate everything in it. In one meal."

Ray acknowledged that too.

"Four days later we reached the nearest outpost. She asked me to let her go. No one knew that I had found her. She said she'd only been the driver and the police didn't know her name. If I let her go, she could walk away from all of it."

"It was ten years, right?" Ray's voice was quiet and rough.

"Her sentence was heavier than I expected."

"Alaska, right? Judge Roy Bean. Frontier justice."

"In Chicago... I saw her twice in passing. The first time she was entering a hotel. The second time she was leaving a taxi. Both times I tried to follow, but she hadn't left any trail. I thought she'd been a hallucination. But I did know she'd been released from prison, and I hoped... Then I walked out of a diner as she was walking in. She'd seen me, too. We talked. It was so easy. We seemed to know each other without question, as if words would always be beside the point.

"She stayed in my apartment for two nights and two days and I stayed there with her. I told my superiors at the consulate I was sick. Then Ray came to find out why I hadn't met him to pay back a loan even though I knew he needed the cash immediately. I followed him out to the street to explain and I heard a gunshot. When I ran back, I found my apartment empty. Dief had been shot, badly hurt.

"I've never been sure how much Victoria improvised after that. I'm sure she always meant me to be found guilty of profiting from the crime I'd turned her in for. As well, shooting Jolly with my gun must have been part of her original plan. But she couldn't have known I had a good friend, a man who'd risk taking her into his home just because I asked him to protect her from a killer. Who'd refuse to take a deal to save himself at my expense. Who'd mortgage his home, his family's home, to give me bail money."

"Who screwed up and shot you instead of her. He shoulda had good enough aim to shoot the one he wanted to."

Ray touched Fraser's back precisely where the scar was hidden under the uniform. Fraser flinched.

"By then it was the best thing that could have happened. If he hadn't hit either of us, I'd have gone with her. If he'd hit her, especially if she died, I wouldn't ever have been free of her."

Ray growled. "I do not get that."

"Nor do I."

Fraser heard a rasp of cloth on skin. Ray, rubbing the palms of his hands dry on the bed-linen.

"One thing I'm sure of. She was never so determined to turn my life into something I had to run from, and to take me with her, as she was after she realised how good a friend Ray was to me."

Ray shifted, pushing insistently against Fraser as he drew his knees up and braced himself. Fraser turned his face up to the ceiling. He hadn't blinked for some time and his eyes were dry. He felt his hair brush against Ray's.

He said, "When I found out how far she had gone... that she had hurt Ray and murdered a woman both of you cared for... I never felt any despair like it. Although that excuses nothing."

Ray cleared his throat, and did it again.

"Ben. Gotta ask. Do you love her?"

Fraser shook his head slowly. "If I were something other than a champion of the law, I'd hunt her down and I think I'd kill her. Fortunately, or not, I'm not free to do that."

He heard Ray sigh.

"Did you love her?"

Fraser turned his head and met Ray's pale sidelong look. He looked back. No answer could possibly be adequate.

Ray's mouth set. He turned and leaned sideways on Fraser's back. For an instant his cheek bristled against Fraser's nape, a startling intimate sensation.

"You were impressed," Ray said.

Fraser shook his head, mystified. "I admired the purity of her will at Fortitude Pass, but--"

"Nah. The other kind of impressed." Ray's face fairly blazed with determination. "Baby ducks. Ducklings. No, not impressed, help me out here."

"Imprinted," Fraser guessed.

"Yeah. Yeah, hear me out. It's a good story even without any Inuits. You're standing there and the duck eggs hatch. When the little guys see you? They think you're mama for the rest of their lives. See, you and Metcalf saved each other's lives. She was there, you were there, you hatched together, you imprinted. Huh." Ray looked as though he'd just remembered something. "You were fixed on her like you would be on a sword stuck through you. It wasn't from the heart. It wasn't love."

"That would appear to be a vast oversimplification," Fraser said promptly. Too promptly, he knew.

"You were the guy who said ya can't be too simple. Ogg's Razor, remember? Ben." He said it like a magic word. "Did you ever feel like, like you couldn't stand not to stretch yourself as hard as you could just to live up to her?"

"Not at all."

Ray spread his hands. "Not love," he said with bravado. "The great Kowalski rests his case."

He turned, twisting the bedcovers under him, planted his feet solidly on the floor, and wrapped his arm around Fraser's shoulders.

Fraser's amour propre disagreed with Ray while his intuition agreed. The intuition felt good... but he suspected it was wrong. And also right, and neither wrong nor right. There would never be a word and there probably never should be one to describe his past feelings for Victoria.

His very thoroughly passed feelings. He could almost have thanked her for committing an act atrocious enough to free him.

But he had still to respond to the under-level of Ray's theory. "And I admire you, Ray, and want to live up to you."

"Whoa. Wait a minute..." Ray turned away, and back again, befuddled.

Fraser didn't wait as long as a minute. He slipped an arm around the waist of his bright enduring Ray.

"Trust me to know purity when I see it--"

"Does not compute, Fraser." Ray sounded panicky.

"Don't worry. I don't delude myself you're perfect."

Ray rewarded Fraser for the barb with a reassured, still perplexed glimmer of a smile.

"Perfection is static. It's frozen. It can break and then it stops holding your weight," Fraser mused. "Trying to be the perfect Mountie didn't support me in the end. Victoria cracked the perfect ice and I had nowhere to go but down. Purity is dynamic. It keeps welling up like a spring. It clears itself of anything that might temporarily taint it. Ray, you take risks with your heart, and you can afford to because you have purity of heart. I hope I can learn it from you. Although I think it may take me the rest of my days."

"Ben." The name came out on Ray's sudden exhalation. "God, listen to me. I can't even talk." He did in fact sound choked. He kissed Fraser's neck with a hot, gliding mouth. "This all right?"

A hint of Ray's understandable insecurity showed in his eyes, along with an equally understandable hint of challenge. But the succubus had left the room. There was no longer any reason for either kind of uncertainty.

"If it isn't right, then I can't imagine what is."

Fraser slid back onto the bed and reached out as he lay back. Ray curled bare-skinned across his chest and looked at him almost nose to nose, his blue eyes brilliant with something like victory and something like wistfulness.

"Wish I'd been your partner all the way back then, Ben..."

Fraser took Ray's face between his two hands, feeling as if what he held was Ray's heart. Ray kissed him with a gentleness that soon proved to be transitory. And, frankly, unnecessary.

********

The aches and pains were still gone and Ray's mirror said all the bruise marks were too. That was good. It wasn't like he wanted Kowalski's marks on him.

His mind went upstairs two floors to who might be getting the complete set of Kowalski's marks right this minute. Oh no, Raimundo Attanasio Vecchio, you stop that line of thought right there.

Ray pushed the desk chair up against the hallway door and the armchair against the glass door. The outside lightbulb could sit there on the porch till morning, he'd fix it then.

The Thornes. If things had turned out better maybe he could've gotten together with them to take Victoria down, he could've left Fraser and Kowalski out of the loop. Because his hunch was that Victoria really was after Dram Thorne and he really would be good bait. Fraser had looked at the newspapers and put together an idea about a hospital employee being responsible. Vicky could've done the same. He'd never thought she was stupid any more than the Bookman was.

Now that -- that was still kind of a problem for him, Ray admitted it. If only to himself. The Bookman had been as smart as a king, and it seemed like there ought to be a little something Ray could learn from him. There ought to be something he could get out of doing all that undercover as good old Armando Langoustini the mid-level Vegas mob boss. Something that would make up for the rest of it. Something like, how to put the right kind of fear into the wrong kind of people so that the right things would happen.

But it was a funny thing. He couldn't picture himself doing that and being able to trust anybody. Not even the people he didn't play Armando with. Not anybody, not even a little, and Ma used to say, "Who mistrusts everybody is the real enemy of the village."

He didn't want that. He didn't want Vegas wherever he went. He wanted the Mountie years back and he wanted Stella back.

"Wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up first." On that, Pop was right for once.

Because there was no getting away from the fact that everyone and everything he had was here in this room right now. No getting away from it at all.

********

This was stupid, all this sitting and staring at the walls. How long had he been doing it? Stupid, feeling sorry for himself. His troubles didn't matter. What mattered was that Stella, his wife to be treasured, had been deprived of her life and everything that went with it.

Look at the clock. He had to get himself some rest if he was going to have a hand in getting his personal business done.

Ray took two painkiller pills out of his shaving case and dry-swallowed them. He was entitled if anyone was, for Christ's sake. By all rights in the normal world he should still be needing them for real pain.

He turned off the lights and stretched out under one sheet, pushing the bedspread and blanket over to the empty side of the bed. Which was never far enough away.

He rolled his head side to side, bent it forward, shoved it back into the pillow to loosen his neck muscles. Then he rolled onto his right side. The pills were going to work fast. He could feel the fuzziness coming up into his head, kind of like soft fur growing inward from his skull. It made his eyelids heavy as honey a few minutes later. A few? How's he supposed to know how long it took?

Thirty-nine years, that's nearly forty. He's closed out a lot of things in his time. Ange, a double walk-away. Irene, what chance had he had, deep down she always belonged to Frankie. Vegas, like putting down a glass of slow poison half finished. Chicago, so many memories. The department, yeah, that door was good and locked now. His family, how could he go back and expose them to some kind of backlash from Vegas? Stella, oh, Stella. Fraser going going gone too. That's a whole lot of successes for a guy who isn't even forty yet. But if he can close out Victoria, a guy can die happy accomplishing that.

A feeling in the air. Maybe it was just those pills but it felt the way it always used to when Pop was hanging around. Ray opened his eyes laboriously. No sign of any ghost. No Ghost Of Lowlife Past. Last seen in Vegas, grinning like a wolf with donuts because of his son the Bookman, his son Langoustini, his son the big-shot Lobsterman. Ray figured that Pop was so happy about sonnyboy's success that his season pass was revoked. He's supposed to be in Purgatory, you know, not a happy place like Vegas.

Maybe Stella would take over the haunting now. He deserved it. One thing is for sure, she'd never put up with Pop coming around and horning in on her turf. Ha. He can picture Stella fighting Pop to a standstill. He'd like to see that, she-who-is-good-at-anything against he-who-is-good-for-nothing. He'd love to be a fly on the wall for that domestic disturbance. Can't be a fly, though. Flies have wings. He isn't going to be going any place where they'll hand him a set of wings...

********

Ray slept loudly, as he often did at first. Fraser rose up on an elbow to study him, then ran an experimental finger along his jaw. It elicited a small twist of Ray's blond head, a little chewing of the air, and no sign of awareness at all. His snores settled down to something not much more obtrusive than a cat's purr. Well. That was worth remembering.

Ray could sleep like this on though dawn and much later than was really appropriate. Awakening him was always a chore but seldom an irksome one.

Fraser smiled to himself. He'd bet anything that was legal that Ray had completely forgotten Stella for at least a little while tonight. A mean-spirited thought. Yes. Still, it was hard to be forbearing to a woman who'd always behaved as if she were personally demeaned by Ray's need of her.

But mean-spiritedness was particularly unfitting for this time. There was something elegiac about these moments: not the post-coital tristesse he'd read of, but a sense of something like history that demanded commemoration. Sadly, moments of great sensation and great emotion couldn't be remembered. Not with the splendour they deserved.

"Huh," Ray said in a very small voice, still asleep.

No, it wasn't always true that memory lacked vividness. It was only that the joys and pleasures made a less lasting impression than the sorrows and pains. Was that peculiar to humans or was it a more general evolved survival mechanism, a regrettably efficient way of remembering what to avoid, something that was common to any creature with consciousness? He could ask Dief. No doubt he'd get a cogent answer. But would it be a constructive one? He begged his own leave to doubt it.

A moment later Fraser gave up what he admitted to himself had been procrastination. He pulled on his boxers and uniform trousers and opened his duffle bag. Barefooted, he took the collar into the bathroom, closed the door quietly, and turned on the light. Sitting down tailor-fashion on the floor he began to examine the collar. He was fully aware of his own sneakiness (sneakitude, Ray would say).

A sniff told him the collar was only weeks old and had spent some time in an atmosphere of cigar smoke. A Havana cigar, unsurprisingly.

The collar was made of two-ply leather. Two pieces of braided steel cable seemed to ornament it; both ran the whole length of the collar and were attached to steel posts that passed through the collar. The steel was coated with thin transparent plastic. He bent the collar gently between his hands and found it wasn't equally flexible everywhere. The slightly uneven stitches he'd noticed before were easy to pick apart with his multifunctional knife.

Between the layers of leather Fraser discovered batteries and several tiny circuit boards that were connected to the steel posts and wired to each other, making the assemblage, as a whole, moderately flexible. The steel braids were presumably loop antennas for a transmitter.

A spring switch was part of the circuit. It was open now but would have been closed while it was compressed within the collar.

The collar also contained a slip of paper folded upon itself.

Outside, right now. I have a hostage.

********

Fraser walked a block, and then another, choosing the directions that led in the darker and less-populated directions. The object of the exercise was to make it easy for Victoria to contact him. He could only hope he was reducing the danger to passersby as well. As he went he spoke softly, describing his route.

Outside...

Had she seen him exit the hotel? Was she surveilling all the doors? She hadn't had a chance to put a tracer on his person.

...right now.

He'd stayed in the room just long enough to finish donning his uniform and to pick up Ray's cellphone. Ray himself... was safer where he was.

I have a hostage.

Who? Ray Vecchio? One of the Tampa police? Some random victim? He knew Victoria too well to think she was bluffing.

Fraser heard a vehicle decelerating behind him. Before he looked around, he looked up at the two- and three-story buildings on this block. He didn't see a second threat there or ahead.

A light tan Jeep Cherokee SUV, a post-1996 model with automatic transmission, stopped beside him. Its sides and front grille were muddy. While he couldn't see the rear of the SUV, he could guess the licence plate was also obscured. He turned away from it just long enough to describe the vehicle, give the time, and urgently request that the dispatcher keep recording and not speak.

He heard the chunking sound of the passenger-side back door unlocking. As he began to reach for the door-handle he remembered something from his father's journal. "Every animal has just enough brains to preserve its own hide, they say, without exception. There was a time when I believed it. That was before I saw this man in action." Putting aside the woodsman's play on words, the comment seemed apropos.

Except -- how intelligent, really, would it be for him to save himself? It would be at the expense of Ray, or Ray Vecchio, or Dief, or Maggie. Or the Vecchio family, the Kowalski family, anyone else Victoria could reach. He owed it to all of them, and most of all to Stella Vecchio, to make up for his self-indulgence in Chicago.

Fraser opened the door and paused again, seeing the trap inside.

"Get in, Ben."

He remembered Victoria's voice well, how it had beauty without any sweetness. Fury slashed through him like a razor-blade. He took two slow breaths and felt the blood pulse of wild anger subside to something that was a form of strength, as hard to harness as it might be.

As he maneuvered himself into the back seat and closed the door, he never looked away from Victoria. She raised her left hand, letting him see that it held something like a TV remote control. She was protected by a barrier of thick clear plastic or glass between front seats and back. It matched the wall between the back seats and the rear storage area.

Victoria's face hadn't changed in the last three years, unless it had hardened a little, become more decided. Her brow was high and clear and there was a feral harshness in the line of her jaw. She looked across the jeep at him with thickly lashed, hooded tawny-green eyes. Her gaze had the self-possessed directness of someone with nothing to hide from herself and everything to hide from others.

"Victoria." His voice was thick. He knew she wouldn't misinterpret it as desire. She had never misinterpreted him.

"It looks like you came alone," she said.

"You knew I would."

Victoria shrugged. "I didn't, but I could've handled it if you hadn't." She looked at him mockingly. "No little blond friend?"

Fraser felt the corners of his mouth draw back: a snarl, not a smile. "I don't intend for you to meet him."

"Sure." She glanced to her right.

Fraser turned in the cramped back seat. An unconscious man was crammed into the space behind. He was curled on his side facing away from Fraser. His breathing was steady and shallow. He was covered with a blanket except for his right arm, which was in a metal tube, and his head: spiked blond hair.

No, it was impossible.

But the cooled air inside the car turned into an icy knot in Fraser's lungs and stomach. Then he saw the many freckles on the back of the man's hand.

"That man is your hostage?"

"Among others." Victoria smiled. "He's just the one you haven't met already."

"Who is he?"

"Does it matter?"

"No." Essentially, it didn't. "What's that?"

"This?" Again she held up the control. "I see your transmitter, and I raise you one radio-detonator. No, don't tell me you aren't carrying a bug. The detector in my pocket says you are. Look at him again. He's wearing enough explosive to blow his arm off. And Ben?" Victoria's finger moved. "Now I'm holding down a dead-man switch. Throw your bug out the window."

The window next to him whirred down. Moving with care, Fraser drew Ray's cellphone out of his uniform shirt.

"Who'd you call?"

"Does it matter?"

Her finger moved slightly, warningly on the button. Her sleeve fell back a little more, exposing her watch. The brilliant-cut stones on its band were probably real diamonds, not faux, considering the intricately primitive motif in which they were set.

"911," he answered her.

"Hang up and throw it out."

He complied, turned back, and scrutinised the hostage again. The metal shell around the man's arm would direct most of the explosion inward, but any escaping shrapnel or brisant force would be directed against his chest or lower face.

"Who is he?" Fraser asked again.

"A loose end."

The SUV pulled away from the curb.

Victoria said, "Right now he's only sedated. If anyone tries to take the bomb off his arm without knowing the trick, it'll go off. Or if I let go of the button before I deactivate it, and there's a trick to that too. Or if anything blocks the signal that my controller is sending to the bomb."

Fraser knew it was his duty not to be too angry, or too proud, to plead. "Put the bomb on me. Let him go."

As he'd expected, she kept driving in silence. He used the time to look for her long dark hairs on the seat or in the rest of the area where he was confined. He had no success. Apparently she had, once again, meticulously removed all evidence of her presence.

Right turn. Two blocks straight. Right turn. Was she taking him back to the hotel? He'd have to resist her, bomb or not, if she tried to use him against Ray or Ray Vecchio... or anyone else. It was police canon: Don't help a hostage-taker acquire more hostages.

Except he had given her one -- himself.

In Chicago she'd played him like a pawn, closing off any help he might have had from police, keeping Ray Vecchio and his family in check, and he hadn't seen a way to block her until the very end. Then she'd played him again. 'Come with me, Ben.' He'd tried.

Looking back, he saw more than one point where he could have escaped. He thought, now, that he'd missed his chances because he'd felt a duty to carry through what he'd started, ruination though it was. He'd sacrificed ten years of Victoria's life to the Law and in return he owed her a sacrifice. Not just one: his duty, his honour, his friends, Ray's home and family, one after another. Nothing satiated her. He might as well have been making a sacrifice of sacrifice itself.

She was playing him again. He'd let her do it. He'd thought this time he was free to serve justice and the only thing he needed to guard against was his own craving for retribution. He should have been on guard against guilt, too. Now he'd given Victoria a hostage to use against his lover and his friend.

But, to his partial relief, Victoria didn't go to the hotel. She parked the car in front of a closed movie theatre not far from the hotel but several blocks from where she'd picked him up. She looked at him carefully, steadily -- regretfully, if he were fool enough to believe it.

"I have no choice except to leave you no choice," Victoria said. "You're in my blood, Ben."

She spoke as she always had, as if what she said were a self-evident truth.

"Don't pretend this is a personal matter. It isn't between the two of us alone," Fraser said sharply. "You've assaulted and kidnapped this man. You destroyed Stella Vecchio and nearly killed Ray. Why?" He might as well try to learn something from her in case he survived.

"Didn't he tell you what I said? If it hadn't been for him, you'd have come with me."

"You said Ray still had to pay for something you'd had to do to obtain a half-million dollars again. But that was after you'd shot him and Stella Vecchio. What further punishment did you have in mind?"

Keeping her left forefinger on the control button, Victoria used the free fingers of her left hand to draw down the wrist of the calfskin glove on her right. The skin of her hand was viciously scarred. She smoothed the glove back into place and pulled up one long loose silk sleeve of her pantsuit and then the other. Thick scars seamed her upper arms. They made her diamond-garnished wristwatch look grotesquely frivolous.

She said, "People make fortunes or lose them every day in some Third World countries. But the hospitals there aren't fit even for animals."

She shook her head slowly and her thick dark curls swung. Fraser could smell bitter myrrh perfume; the air seal between front and rear seats wasn't perfect.

"I lost a lot of blood that I wouldn't have had to if I'd been able to keep the diamonds I bought in Chicago," she said, looking him in the eye.

"What was your third revenge on Ray? The arson?"

Victoria sighed impatiently. "If he hadn't been there I could've picked up the diamonds and taken them. And you were coming with me when he shot you."

"If I had come with you, how long would it have been before you killed me?"

"I had the right."

"You'd had the chance."

Victoria met his eyes again, a long searching look full of solitude.

In Chicago she'd told him, 'Hate. Love. Those two emotions about cover it.' She'd held a gun on him twice and not fired, though he could see how deeply she needed to shoot him.

At Fortitude Pass she'd had an absolute singleness of will. It had saved both of them. It was possible she didn't understand, any more than he did, the division in her will that had made her let him live in Chicago.

"How long till I killed you?" She laughed as though she wanted to strike him. "You mean, how long till you betrayed me for the third time? We'd have been free and that wouldn't have been enough for you. You don't value freedom the way you should. You don't even dream about it. If you ever had, you wouldn't have turned me in and you wouldn't have hesitated about coming with me."

She reached across herself with her right hand and drew a weapon from the space next to her seat. It looked like a sawed-off shotgun with a wood stock. He'd last seen it used on wolves who were ranging too far: a Palmer capture gun.

Did she mean to take him with her? But he doubted the dart held anything as innocuous as a tranquilliser.

"Get out of the car, Ben." She ran her window down. "Then brace yourself there, against that wall, with your back to me."

"One last question," he said.

"One? You mean, will I turn myself in?" She laughed again.

"At Fortitude Pass you recited a poem. I never made out the words."

"And you want to know what it was?"

"Yes."

Something flashed in her eyes. Relishing the words, she said, "'Sing, O Muse, the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless woes upon the Greeks. Many a warrior's soul it sent to Hades and many a hero's flesh did it give to the dogs and vultures, for so was the will of Zeus fulfilled.' And so on. I must've gone through all the parts of the Iliad my father taught me, over and over again."

"Roger Metcalf?"

"No. My father." Now her eyes were enraged and murky. "Get out, Ben."

Fraser didn't move. Once he was out, could he grab the gun by the barrel and take it from her? Almost certainly. The gun held only one dart. She'd be disarmed, except for the detonator. He could incapacitate her and tourniquet the hostage, whom she'd (probably) kill anyway. A hard situation required, in fact justified, a hard solution.

No. Victoria's ruthlessness was no excuse for him to pat himself on the back for being not quite so ruthless.

But one idea led to another.

"Remember the bomb, Ben. Get out. Leave the door open. Turn around and stand."

"I'll do what you want once he's out of the car and the bomb's off his arm."

Victoria shook her head, smiling. Fraser opened his door, watched her smile widen, and stopped with one leg out.

"I think I won't," he said.

"I think you will."

"I'm not so sure I see what you'd accomplish by setting off the bomb. You had a plan. You've been forming it for years, or at least months. Now, when you're so close, you'll throw it away for nothing but a loose end? I don't see your logic."

"I'm not throwing anything away. You are. You're pushing your luck. And his."

Fraser watched her eyes and her button finger. Neither moved.

"I know you too well, Victoria. You called him a loose end. That means you'll kill him whatever I do. That leaves you with no leverage on me, and a one-shot weapon that won't fire through this shield," he rapped on the plastic, "and a car you can't escape in without taking me with you. Which of us has the real freedom to act, you or I?"

Victoria laid the capture gun on the passenger seat, leaned down, and came up with a nine-millimetre semi-automatic. She pointed it at his face.

"I do," she said.

"Bulletproof," said Fraser, tapping the shield again. "Why else would the plastic be so thick? Am I the one who's trapped, Victoria? Or are you?"

Her finger slipped sideways to the edge of the button. He let his lips draw back again, and settled himself deep in the seat.

And Victoria believed it of him. She had some reason to believe him ruthless, after all.

"One loose end more or less won't matter for long," she said with forced lightness, "and it'd be a shame to waste good explosive." She popped the back hatch.

"After that, I'll stand and let you shoot me," Fraser told her. "I promise you that freely."

She received the last word as if it was a slap. For a moment he thought she'd fire at him.

The hostage was a small, light-boned man. His Ray-like hair was almost certainly a wig, another of Victoria's brutal inspirations. Fraser laid the man carefully in the niche of a doorway and put a finger on the pulse point in the neck. Not strong.

He moved back to the side of the car and stood at parade rest. "Think of this as a demonstration of real freedom, Victoria. Keeping a promise for a good purpose."

She stared at him. "God. I wouldn't want to have your delusions." She sounded shaken as well as angry. "Look -- I'm setting a timer for long enough to let me finish taking this off him. I can stop the countdown and you can't, so don't try anything."

Putting the pistol down out of Fraser's reach, she started to work on the armband. He was able to follow most of what she did, what wires she cut to disconnect the steel shell and what number she entered on the keypad the shell had covered.

The odds, he thought, were good. He wouldn't have been able to turn her leverage against her if she weren't very near the climax of her revenge plan, an endpoint she desperately, urgently wanted. If that were the case, Ray and Ray Vecchio, and Maggie and Dief, were probably of no further interest to Victoria. He could protect them by giving her what she wanted, and then he or Ray would have another chance to catch her with the Thornes' help. This time it was a matter of duty, not guilt; future, not past.

Victoria gestured Fraser over to the wall. He obeyed, bringing all his self-discipline to bear. She made an adjustment to the controller, set it and the explosive device on the back seat, and closed the back door and the hatch.

"Let's finish our business." She kept the pistol aimed at him.

Hands braced on the wall, he waited, watching her over his shoulder. Her eyes didn't meet his again. She got into the driver's seat, swung the door closed most of the way, let the barrel of the capture gun rest on the window frame. The scar from Ray Vecchio's bullet ached as if she was looking at it. He wondered if she meant to shoot him there.

The impact of the dart in his inner right buttock was briefly agonizing, then numbing, and he fell to his hands and knees.

Victoria approached. There was a single short unrelieving twinge as she yanked out the dart.

"Now go back to your boyfriend," she said viciously. "Give him my love."

As he rose, feeling a liquid hot weariness running down into his legs and softening them like wet sponges, she backed to the car and raised the pistol to point at the man in the doorway. Wobbling, Fraser tried to plunge into her line of fire. His knees unlocked. He fell back against the wall. His head knocked against it. While the wave of darkness was still flowing across his vision he heard a cry, Victoria's.

"No!"

Something light fell to the sidewalk. It sounded as if Victoria was fumbling with the car door. Then it unlatched, slammed, and the car accelerated violently away.

********

Ray knew he was at the gates of Hell because all of Hell's doorbells were ringing at once. His eyes wouldn't open. He pulled one hand up through molasses and rubbed his eyelids. They unstuck. The noise stopped.

Morning. Hotel room. Phone. What had it been, a wake-up call? The clock said six-fifteen. Had he asked for a wake-up call? Hell no.

A cold wet washcloth rubbed over his face made the world a whole lot easier to understand. He'd have to get a move on. Benny was a crack-of-dawn boy. If he wasn't up and at 'em already, it was only because of Kowalski...

Take a big imaginary eraser and wipe out that line of thought. The hell with it. It was enough to make a guy want to drop right back into bed with the pillow wrapped around his head.

The phone rang again.

"Vecchio. Who's this?" His voice creaked. Those pain pills were lulus.

"I came by last night." Dram Thorne. That's right, he was supposed to... "I'll be telling you the phone numbers you can find us at today."

"Hang on. Okay. Go." Ray grabbed a pencil and wrote on the top of the nightstand. "You on your regular track?"

"Both of us are."

So they'd gone to work at their day jobs just like nothing gonzo was in the works. Perfect bait.

"You found pay phones?"

"Hers is the central phone for the company's computer-geek pool. Mine's at an office that's unoccupied today and tomorrow, and I'll be working near it."

"Good, glad to hear it." Not too likely to be bugged. Ray yawned till his jaw hurt. "You've got my cell number, right?"

"It may seem strange but I haven't lost it since last night. What's your problem? Are you talking in your sleep?"

"Funny fellow. You must have something useful to do, right?"

Thorne snorted and hung up.

Ray gulped a high-caffeine diet pill and assembled himself. Not one of his best suits, not today, because Fraser was in town and it was open season on fine apparel.

********

Shit shit shit, why wouldn't the alarm shut the fuck up? Ray whacked it a few more times. Nothing happened. What the fuck, was he losing his touch?

Phone. He grabbed it by the neck.

"What?"

"It's time to greet the new day, Kowalski," said Vecchio, sounding hatefully awake.

"Where?.." Where was Ben?

"Come on already, you're supposed to be the hyperactive one."

"Is Fraser down there with you?"

"You mean you don't know where he is." Vecchio's voice was mob-flat.

Ray dropped the receiver on the table. Bathroom, closet, window, nothing gave him a clue. Ben hadn't left him a message. Except, there, on top of his duffle.

"That dog collar," Ray said into the phone. "He opened it up, there was a note inside, it's here. Says for him to come outside, she has a hostage. And there was a doohickey inside the collar too, maybe a tracer."

"Where were you while all this was going on?"

"Same place you were. Down for the count."

"I told you how he was about her and how she could lure him, and you didn't do a thing to keep him from going out by himself."

"Fuck off. The only way I coulda stopped him was by sleeping across the door."

"That'd be a good role for you to play in life, Stanley. What you'd be good at. A draft-stopper." The phone on the other end of the line clicked down quietly.

Teeshirt. Jeans. He was going to go down there. Socks. Shoes. He was going to go down there at a dead fucking run. Holster. Gun. He was going to kill Vecchio dead, swear to God. Badge. No, forgot, no badge. Wait, yes badge. Kick Vecchio in the head till he ran out of head. Bracelet. Ring. No, no ring.

What was he thinking?

Ray punched the wall. Then he picked up the phone and threw it. Its cord yanked it out of the air, it bounced off the armchair, banged up against the window, clunk, but nothing broke.

What the fuck was he thinking? What did he have for brains, chickenshit? Who the fuck was he to get mad at what Vecchio said? Vecchio hadn't kept Stella safe. He, Stanley Ray Kowalski, personally, had said a lot of shit about that. Now he hadn't kept Ben safe. So who in the name of fuck was he to take Vecchio down for saying shit?

Ray ran water on his knuckles, which bled, and tried to think. Where to go first? The precinct? The hospital? The morgue?

Ben. You dumb bastard. Why don't you ever keep yourself safe?

********

"Hello. Paul Pasckert's desk." It was Dram Thorne's voice.

"It's the guy you dropped in on last night."

"Hold on." A long pause. "All right. I'm out of sight. Is it bad news?"

Ray closed his eyes and pressed flashing lights into them with his fingers. Even so he could still see Fraser lying in the hospital bed and the terrible nakedness of Kowalski's face.

"Victoria got to Fraser. He's still alive, but--"

"What's the diagnosis?" Thorne was terse. "I need to know that before I can cast the right spell, presuming I know one."

"They found him out cold on the sidewalk with an empty tranquilizer dart next to him. One of those Wild Kingdom knockout darts, you know? Like he was an animal. Fraser smelled the dart before he passed out and he says it was partly the regular trank juice and partly something else. They're doing tests on the residue now. There was another guy flat on the sidewalk next to Fraser. He was overdosed, maybe with the same stuff, and he might not make it."

"Does the constable have any kind of liver or kidney disease? If he does, the detox spell might be a danger to him. His liver will be doing double-time to turn the drugs into chemicals that don't affect the mind, and his kidneys will need to dump the waste fast."

Ray felt wacky with relief. "Fraser's the healthiest Mountie on the planet. His organs are on a special Canadian fitness program. They're the least of your worries."

"You're sure?"

"Dead sure. I mean--"

"What about the man with the overdose?"

"He's a genuine solid-gold piece of shit. Randall Greening. He must've been Victoria's little helper, because it turns out he's the high-tech specialist my home security company subcontracted some work to. Back before he went into private consulting he was in the arson squad and bomb squad up in Athens. He's done a lotta consulting mostly for cash, just not for more than a week now because he's been a missing person. They aren't sure how many needle holes he has in him because they can't tell the holes from the freckles. They think he's been kept under the whole time."

Another pause, long enough to feel a little off. "Can you get close to him? I'll be needing some of his hair," Thorne said neutrally.

Ray grinned. "That's good. That's really good. Take a look into Greening's scummy cranium and see if he knows how to find her."

There was a half-suppressed groan on the other end of the line.

"What?" Ray demanded.

"I hadn't thought, but you're right. I'll be having to do that."

"What did you have in mind if it wasn't extra-sensory investigation?"

"Detox."

"He took Victoria's money to help her kill Stella. Let him rot."

"I won't." Thorne sounded like a brick wall. "I'm no accomplice of Metcalf's."

When he put it that way... "Okay, you might be right about that. Why not make Randy-boy all better? He'll probably be a primo witness against her."

Pause. "Can you get the hair to me without letting Metcalf see we're in contact?"

The Armando lobe of Ray's brain took over the conversation and figured out an easy cover. Thorne's Cancer Center buddies got their donuts from the same shop every day? Thorne took his turn at picking them up sometimes? Do it today and he'd get a little something extra for his trouble, the envelope of hair Ray would tape to the back of the toilet tank in the restroom.

"Arson, bombs, and bugs," Thorne said next. "As if she's a real-life criminal mastermind. Frankly, it's hard for me to believe a creature like that exists."

"Victoria Metcalf is enough to make any man wonder about demonic possession. Wait a minute, you do magic -- you should know. Are demons for real?"

"Ask someone who's in good standing with the Church." A voice like nuclear winter. "I have work to do."

Clunk.

********

Ray looked at Triff's sneery face and saw everything turn red and dark like the moon going through an eclipse. He kept himself from making fist-shaped holes in the guy by imagining being stuck in a crevasse freezing. Play this real close to the chest, real frosty. Okay. Okay.

"Why not do it?" he demanded. "Because the Tampa PD isn't good enough to pull it off?"

"We -- do not trust -- you boys." Triff said it the way you'd lay down the law to a whiny kid.

Not okay.

Ray sprang at him, found himself swinging like a door around the hinge of his own arm because Fraser had anchored onto it. There was some pushing and clinching, but Ray got half-hearted about it when he noticed Fraser's hospital gown. Patient on board, here. Patient who till not so long ago had been nearly unable to move except for slurring and mumbling like a sleeptalker.

"Kowalski, I can tell you right now the Lieutenant won't have the least li'l desire to let you volunteer to play bait for Madama Dartgun. You're a loose cannon. Your Mountie," Triff said the word so it came out dirty, "is a fruit-cake. Vecchio is crooked. You boys are not part of our plans."

Ray wrenched loose and his first jab missed Triff, who was faster than his hound face and soft belly made him look. Fraser yanked him back.

"Ray!"

He whirled to knock Fraser off of him. But. No. Do not punch Fraser. Not again. Once in a lifetime was already too much.

"Detective," Fraser said, "I think your presence here may be counterproductive."

Ray stopped. He felt like a ton of something cold and thick had dropped all over him. Oh. Frase wasn't talking to him.

"I just bet you think that."

"Perhaps you would leave."

"Nothing could be finer." Triff strolled out.

Fraser moved fast and shut the door very softly. The room turned normal-colored again.

"Ray, I don't think--"

"That fucking son of a bitch!"

"Ray!" A whole yell wadded up into a whisper. "From his perspective, his objections are logical."

"Logical like last night was logical! No answer at Triff's place or Kaufman's when they tried to put you through. Dispatch didn't pass your call on for ten minutes. Then the blues took three times that long to find you on the sidewalk."

"That's an exaggeration, Ray--"

"The fuck it is. Ya think that's how Tampa does all their officer assists? Thirty-two minute delays? Thirty-two fucking minutes! Bullshit!" Ray panted a moment. Fraser started to say something, Ray made guillotine slashes with his hands. "Then you get here to the hospital, you got notes in your pocket about precinct contacts and emergency contacts. Does anybody call anybody at any time about any thing? Fuck no. I bet the nurses were too busy fighting over who'd get to peel your uniform off."

A small huff. "Please -- don't spare my blushes, Ray."

Ray wanted to punch a Mountie. He wanted to yell some sense into a Fraser. He wanted to do something else with a Ben but he didn't know what.

"My point is," he gave Fraser the double pointer fingers, "that is not how ya do an officer assist, Fraser. That is how a bunch of fucking sons of bitches leave a fag cop twisting in the wind."

"I... reserve judgment on the department's professionalism until I have more evidence," said Fraser, so calm he made Ray jig from foot to foot in frustration. "I concede that Leftenant Carranza and Detectives Triff and Kaufman might have some theories regarding our partnership. But is it really likely that every officer and dispatcher in Tampa would be aware of that?"

"How do ya spread news faster than the telephone? The tell-a-cop."

A sigh. "Be reasonable, Ray." Fraser shifted his weight a little, like his sore cheek was getting mashed up against the door.

"Fraser, ya lost your merit badge in reasonability last night. Also? Your badge in not fucking your partner in a way that is not the good way."

Fraser's jaw went squarer.

"Is it or is it not my sworn duty to protect citizens from criminal attack?"

"Evasive. Tactics. Fraser."

"Where's the evasion? Explain that to me, Ray."

Calm down, Stanley Ray Kowalski, be persuasive. "Did your oath go, 'I swear by the Queen I won't ask my partner for backup, I won't tell him what's going on, and I'll paint a big freaking dayglo target on myself any time I can'?"

"Since I could avoid giving Victoria more hostages, doing so would have been poor practice." Fraser shifted again.

"The Tampa cops don't count as hostages? You told them, Fraser. You did not tell me."

"You do realize she'd rather use you against me than use some random officer?"

"So why hasn't she?"

Fraser clamped his mouth. "If you'll excuse me a moment."

Ray watched him stride to the can, spine straight. That made three drainage excursions in the last hour or so. Not once had his hospital gown gaped in the back like it would on anyone else. It figured.

A knock on the door. Ray swore at it.

"Save your sweet talk." Vecchio rolled into the room, Armani on wheels. "I got spare clothes for Benny, and donuts for you, and things we all gotta talk about."

"Donuts for me." Ray looked in the pink bakery box. A full dozen. Vecchio hadn't sneaked any for himself. "What's in 'em, arsenic?"

"An apology, dickhead." Vecchio didn't smile. "It isn't like I know anybody in the world who can stop Super-Mountie from jumping off tall places and into deep shit."

"Huh." Ray blinked. "You Italians think food fixes everything." He handed Vecchio a donut with powdered sugar, hoping to see it fall all over the suit. "Donuts. Who do ya think I am, the wolf?"

Right away he regretted asking a leading question like that, but he lucked out. Vecchio got distracted when Fraser opened the bathroom door.

"So. You're in the flush of health?"

"As you expected, apparently." Fraser cocked his head.

Vecchio held up an anti-surveillance headset. Thorne. That figured.

Fraser nodded and accepted the bag of clothes. "This will only take a moment."

He closed the door again. Ray scowled. Fraser wouldn't've hid behind a door to get undressed if Vecchio hadn't been here. Also he wouldn't've had a chance to take cover behind clothes-changing when he should've been coming out of his corner, ding, for the second round of the Great Backup Fight.

Except it was more like it was the tenth round, or the twentieth, or the lost-my-count-ieth.

In less time that Ray would've thought was humanly possible Fraser came out dressed. He was wearing a short-sleeved denim shirt and blue jeans. Normally those were good colors on him. This time they made him look pale. Ray's heart flipped, and the side that came up was worry. This time it didn't flip back again and make him angrier.

Fraser gazed at him solemnly. "Ray, as I tried to tell you a moment ago, I don't think Victoria has any interest in attacking you."

Vecchio snorted. "What makes Kowalski her special cop friend?"

"Friendship has nothing to do with it. The other substance in the dart's reservoir was blood."

"You kept that fact to yourself before," Vecchio said, his mouth tight.

"Yes, I--"

"Ben," said Ray, his insides evaporating.

"Yes, Ray. I was averse to discussing this with anyone from Tampa before I'd told you."

"Oh, Benny." Vecchio's mouth was un-set now, like a child's.

"I can't see why Victoria would have gone to so much trouble to inject me with blood," Fraser said stonily, looking Ray in the eye, "unless it was infected blood. Which answers your earlier question. Why hasn't she attacked you, Ray? Why won't she attack you in future? Because she already has, indirectly, through me."

Vecchio looked back and forth between Ray and Fraser. He said, "I'm gonna go talk to an expert about this," sounding like his voice-box was a thousand miles away and not tuned in on the right frequency. A second later he was out the door.

"He thinks the close encounter people can fix it," Ray said, a little jittery with hope.

"It would be unwise to be too hopeful too soon."

"Thought you trusted them."

"Insofar as I've witnessed their... therapy methods, yes. But a full and rigorous evaluation would require," and Fraser went into a spiel full of techie jargon. "Double blinds," "placebo," "selection bias."

Ray let it rumble past slowly like the commute on the Circle Interchange. He watched Ben's gray-blue eyes, where it looked like thoughts were going by out of synch with the word traffic.

Thoughts, maybe, like AIDS. Maybe not the dying really young and really slow part, because even with normal magic-free medicine that didn't happen so much anymore. Not that, but the part about living like an untouchable. Telling Welsh. Telling the Ice Queen's replacement. Getting sacked. Getting shunned. Getting lonely. Lonelier. Never getting close to anybody again, because Ben wasn't a halfway guy about safety. He'd throw his own away a hundred percent, he'd protect other peoples' a hundred percent.

"Are you listening, Ray?"

There it was, the early warning signs of the Mountie face Ray didn't want to see. Eyes widened and gray, eyebrows drawn in, corners of the mouth down, chin up and firm. The face of a guy who thought he didn't deserve anything better from the world than to be a hero.

"Sorry, Ben, no. Did you get to the part yet about, 'Ray, my friend, my conscience won't let me do anything but dump you because I can't stand you taking any chances on my behalf'? 'Cause that's the part I'm waiting for."

Ray rose to the balls of his feet for a second. Instinct said, be ready to dodge the blow.

"That's uncalled for, Ray."

"What is? Making my own decisions? Taking the risks I wanna take?" Ray pulled out his wallet and flipped it open. "Look at the DOB. 1962. Do the math. Am I a legal adult, or what?"

"Of course you are--"

"I can take care of myself and you too."

"That's hardly at issue, Ray."

"You threw away my backup last night! It freaking is the issue."

"I didn't want to put you in danger pointlessly."

Ray flung his hands out. "I don't need ya to, I can do it myself."

Ben looked at him as if he'd done something kiddy like wiggling his ears. "Don't ask me to go against my conscience."

"Ya think ya got a monopoly on that?" Ray met a blue-eyed glare. That was good, it was Ben glaring at him, it wasn't the last best hope of the RCMP looking noble like a memorial statue. "Ya got the picture yet?"

"I have a vivid picture. My father," and Ben was looking more Ben-like all the time, "is out somewhere manfully ranging the northern reaches of the Territories. I'm in the cabin... wallowing under the sealskin cover on my trundle bed, smelling the breakfast porridge my mother set out to cool before she went outside. I hear a shotgun blast very close. I know by the timbre of the sound that the gun doesn't belong to any of the local hunters. I stay in the cabin because I've always been told that unknown gunfire means poachers, who aren't to be trusted. My mother doesn't come in. My father arrives about an hour later. He's doubled back too late to catch Muldoon."

"Jesus, Ben."

"I won't expose you to insane malice. My father taught me that much, though not by example."

It was still Ben talking even if he was saying the wrong thing. Which meant Ray had trouble staying angry now. Right when he needed angry so he could send up fireworks and get Ben's attention. Shit, if he couldn't do angry, he could do determined.

"Like you can keep it from happening. Crazy awful shit comes outta the woodwork every day. It comes outta thin air. I could get struck by, by," lightning was too everyday, "undead teddy bears, I could--"

"That isn't the point, Ray!" Whoa. Fraser was back, and Fraser was rude.

"The point is, you do not get to dump me to save me from crazy shit! Ya try it and you're gonna see me set a whole new gold-ribbon standard for stalking."

"Ray, you can't talk me into thinking that decisions of that kind are in your hands, not mine." Eyes blazing blue.

"Right back at ya!"

"Wait a minute." Fraser shook his head sharply and stared. "I see. We aren't still discussing backup, are we?"

Ray exhaled. "That light bulb above your head? Save it for the next power outage."

"Really, Ray." If Ray's father had been taking that tone, the next sound would've been Ray getting paddled to make his ass smart because of his smartass mouth. Fraser kept staring at him, an unbelieving look. "You thought I'd break off our... partnership because I might be HIV-positive."

"You can do without me giving you backup, all for my own good. What other kind of partnership can you do without for my own good?" Was that needy or what? Ray studied the floor.

"The two things are as different as chalk and cheese." Ray could feel Fraser looking at him for a long minute before he said the next thing. "Ray, I wouldn't betray your trust. As I'm sure you wouldn't betray mine."

Ray's head snapped up so fast it creaked his neck. Before he could start yelling about the idea there was any question, he saw Fraser's face. Very not-what-he-just-said. Very neutral. Very please-don't-inconvenience-yourself-on-my-behalf. Very un-Ben.

He wrapped his arms around Fraser and hung on. Two breaths later, Ben laid his arms around Ray's ribs gently and lightly, as if Ray was the patient here.

"If I am infected, it's only a matter of treatment and precautions," Ben said. "People who are HIV-positive often live for decades. They can have... lovers without putting them at risk." He went on and on, reeling out true facts that Ray had mostly heard before.

Ray nodded and grunted. He figured that if Ben wanted a real conversation he wouldn't be talking with his head down and his mouth muffled in Ray's neck.

That was okay. That was good. Ray wasn't up for a real conversation either. The way he'd thought about killing Metcalf with his bare hands before? It was nothing to what he was thinking now.

********

"I found out some more," said Ray into the phone, and then he choked.

After a minute of Ray's silence, Thorne said, "It must be worse than last time."

"It's the worst. Jesus. Look, I gotta work up to it, I can't say it cold. Anyway, there are a few things I gotta warn you about. The first one is, there's a pretty good chance Vicky's not after any of us three any more. That makes it your turn at the wrong end of the shooting range, as of now."

"That's a timely warning. Thanks."

"Next there's the Tampa PD. They told Kowalski they didn't want him to jump on the hook like a good little worm so he could lure Victoria Metcalf into reach. Then they stopped me in the hall to make sure I knew that too."

Pause. "Are you thinking they were protesting too much?"

"My guess is they're gonna follow Kowalski around, whatever. We're gonna have to find some way to get ourselves out of their sight."

"It always comes down to invisibility, doesn't it?" A faintly grim chuckle.

"No, it comes down to me knowing how to drive Chicago-style. If I can't leave these shitkickers choking on my exhaust, I'll eat Fraser's hat."

After another pause, Thorne laughed a pretty dubious laugh. "We'll have to leave that to you, then. But I'm expecting we'll make an early departure if we see police."

"Not like that surprises me." The off-rhythm gaps Thorne put in the conversation were getting on Ray's nerves. "Here's the next thing. We know more about Victoria's methods now." He told Thorne all about what Fraser had been through, every trick and gimmick the bitch had used. "I already told you about the dart. Fraser thinks it was... he knows what was in it besides tranquilizer. He says it was blood. He thinks it was, you know, biological warfare."

"God damn her," Thorne said slowly. Ray thought he heard the man swallow hard. "Are you sure, though? If she'd done that to him, I wouldn't have thought she'd leave him a clue. It would undermine her plans, because there's a good chance of successfully treating some of these blood-borne diseases if you do it in the first days after infection. Could she have left the dart to fake you out?"

"Fraser's pretty sure something startled her into dropping it and leaving a lot faster than she'd planned."

"Let's hope he's wrong."

"The news stories about idiopathy talked about too many people getting over AIDS. Was that you? Can you cure him?"

More gap-osis of the conversation. Ray gritted his teeth. He didn't want to think what he'd just started thinking. He didn't want to think Dram Thorne had his hand over the phone so he could ask someone what to say next.

"There's more than one blood-borne disease. It would depend which one she gave him. If she's well off, she could buy access to a variety of them. I have spells for the common ones but not the exotics, the hemorrhagic fevers from tropical countries."

Oh God. "Fraser said she said she's been in the Third World."

"Some of the worst come from there -- like Ebola, though I'm doubting she'd dare to handle anything so contagious. Anything like that would be beyond me."

"Those virus blood-tests take a while to get results, you know. Would it hurt Fraser for you to cast all the spells you've got right now?"

"It wouldn't, but..." Break. When Thorne came back he sounded unsure of himself. "You'd be destroying evidence against Metcalf. The constable's infection, if he is infected."

Delaying tactics. This just got worse and worse.

Armando weighed in. He pointed some things out. Thorne hadn't ever proved he found out about the home invasion from a spell instead of from Victoria herself. Thorne hadn't proved he could cure diseases, either, just heal wounds.

Infect Benny, leave him the dart to let him know it, offer him a treatment that didn't treat. Cat and mouse, that was Victoria's specialty.

Except Dram Thorne hadn't struck him that way last night.

Armando was unfazed by that idea. He said, So suppose for the sake of argument you know a good guy when you see one. So what? Good guys finish last. Think about this, maybe Victoria took Ivy Thorne or somebody hostage since last night. That would cause quite a change in a man's loyalties, am I right or am I right?

"Who's there with you?" Ray broke out. Armando wouldn't have done it, wouldn't have given away what he'd guessed. But Armando was the world's greatest example not to follow. "Who's there telling you what to say?"

This time Thorne was sure and quick, but not with an answer. "I'm not working against you. I'll cast the spells against hepatitis and HIV. For now, I need to call Ivy and warn her I'm making some other preparations."

Clunk.

********

As the Lexus' engine stopped, Ray doffed the security headset and tweaked his hair till it was upright again. "Anything else on your Christmas list? No? Back in a mo."

Ray swaggered from the car across the parking lot and into the consumer electronics shop. Partway there he bucked his shoulders back and forth, loosening them, belying the insouciance he seemed to feel was his duty at the moment. Fraser watched him all the way to the door and loved him for his gallantry.

Ray Vecchio's attention was fixed on his rear-view mirror. When he saw Fraser had noticed him he looked away.

"I still haven't spotted a Tampa tail," he said.

"Nor I."

Ray grunted, closed his shadowed eyes, and leaned his close-shorn head back against the leather of the headrest. His hands were loosely at rest on the Lexus' steering wheel. A greater contrast to an unhappy Ray Kowalski could hardly be imagined. It raised an old question in Fraser's mind.

"Ray. Would you mind my asking a question about your undercover work?"

Ray's hands twitched and his face changed from fatigue (or depression?) to a mask of relaxation. "What, Fraser?"

"I've always wondered why Ray was chosen to impersonate you, considering the differences in your physiognomies and habits."

"That's what you wanna know? Jesus, Fraser, don't throw a guy a curve ball like that." Ray laughed, opened his eyes, kept them directed at the ceiling. "Cover within cover. Anyone who put one brain cell together and caught on to the difference between Kowalski and me and tried to find out where I went, he'd've found evidence I'd been sent to Italy to go undercover against the Mob. See, the fibbies already knew how hard it was to find someone who looked like the Bookman, so they knew they wouldn't find any cop who looked like me."

"But Ray Kowalski, for heaven's sake!"

"Lieutenant Welsh made them let me pick which candidate to use. He had that much clout, anyway. I wanted a guy who knew what he was doing on the job and would treat my family and you right." He met Fraser's inquiring gaze with a grim smile. "And, okay, maybe I was hoping he'd be spotted and the feebs would have to haul me back home pronto."

"Oddly enough, the difference in your appearance worked in your favour. A snitch named Frankie Siracusa claimed you'd stolen nine kilos of China white from him. He wasn't able to identify Ray Vecchio in a line-up and so was discredited. It was Ray who proposed the line-up to check Siracusa's veracity."

"Yeah? Kowalski didn't tell me that part." Ray sighed. "Shit. That only fixed the mess while he was on the spot. Now if I go back to Chicago wearing the genuine Vecchio face, Frankie can nail me up again any time he wants. Maybe I ought to consider plastic surgery. Like Frannie always said."

"Everyone knew you were innocent, Ray."

"Sure, sure," Ray Vecchio said with a dismissive shrug. "The Lieu said that too."

Fraser saw this was meant to close the topic. Feeling that Ray needed to be taken out of himself, and perhaps to be updated about things "he" had done in his absence, he attempted conversation about another, less charged event of Ray Kowalski's undercover tenure. Ray's responses were something less than desultory.

Finally there was a silence, and Ray was the one who broke it.

"I want you to remember one thing, Benny. I wasn't Officer Perfect, but I was the one who picked out Kowalski to take care of you in the big bad city. You remember that in my favour, will you? When you're back in Canada, you know."

More uneasy than before, Fraser said, "I'll always remember a great deal more than that in your favour, Ray."

"Is that a promise?" Eyebrows arched in very false jocularity.

"You can count on it."

"Thanks, Benny." Ray closed his eyes again.

Gobsmacked, Fraser looked down at the hat on his knees and up again at the vulnerable nape of Ray's neck. He felt a sharp contradictory sense of floundering in deep waters and, simultaneously, of being about to tear out his keel on the reefs.

What, exactly, was on Ray's mind?

Survivor guilt was the likeliest explanation.

Shame because he'd tried to trick Fraser into staying away from Florida and the investigation? Possible, though needless.

Ray had alluded to his tour of duty in Las Vegas. While there he could hardly have avoided committing acts that were morally ambiguous, not to mention illegal. The memory could leave him feeling unsure of himself in associating with an officer of the law.

But it seemed to Fraser that Ray's unease with him had been constantly increasing. That couldn't be explained by events entirely in the past. It was certainly possible that at present Ray felt displaced by Ray, but a best friend had nothing to fear from a lover. Surely such a loving man as Ray Vecchio would realise that.

Unless...

No.

The only rational alternative had to do with future events. Not for the first time, Fraser entertained the idea that Ray was consciously planning to kill Victoria when (when?) they found her.

The intent was as forgivable as it was understandable. It was not Fraser's role to condemn Ray, but to ensure he didn't sacrifice himself for revenge on her and so consummate Victoria's revenge on him. She had already been too successful...

Fraser rubbed at his face. He breathed deeply and methodically. He busied himself with deciding which of the occupied vehicles around them might be tails. He tried to listen to the meaningless white noise of the privacy generator instead of pathetically sounding out his own veins for any first signs of disease.

********

Ray stared up at the thunderhead out to the west. It loomed like a mad thing. It was even huger and whiter than the one the day before and it looked like one of those big stinging jellyfish, except for being rock-solid all the way down instead of fringy with tentacles. When he stood still for half a minute he could see the edges of the cloud moving, spreading up and out. Jeez. Being here this time of year was like being stuck in an alien war zone with alien weapons in the sky.

Nobody in the parked cars or out of them seemed to be watching him. Fraser and Vecchio were still in the Lexus where he'd left them. So far so good.

He flopped down in the nice cool leather of the front seat. Pleasant and then no, not so much, because he remembered thinking that before, when Stella was the one driving.

"Your new cell-phone." Ray dropped it on Vecchio's leg. "And yours," and Fraser took it from him. "Got a scanner radio, too. I played nice and called the TPD to give them my new cell number. That's why my phone's off now, can't let them trace us with it. Ya want the official news bulletin?"

"It isn't enough that we have hot air outside the car?" groused Vecchio. "We have to have it inside too?"

Ray said, "Greening is as full of leads as he is of shit. He has dates and times when Metcalf met with him at his office, times he tried to tail her and she lost him, one time she didn't lose him until she got outta the car and walked into a hotel. He says he got some photos and her prints, too." A wannabe blackmailer, that was Randall Greening.

"Did he obtain any DNA samples from her?" asked Fraser.

"I asked that. No. Hey, Vecchio, you might wanna know. Victoria's the suspect on the arson now. They'll let you back into your bowling alley."

"Nice guys. Princes among men."

"Also, it was human blood in the dart." His eyes met Ben's, a mutual lean-on-me kind of look. "The stuff it was mixed with, the knock-out drug. It makes it hard to test the blood for antibodies. They can run a DNA test on it, though."

Fraser nodded. "Ray," that was for Vecchio, "when you next talk with our visitor, ask whether the blood he scrys with has to be pure. There's a chance the source knows something about her but is still alive."

"For what good it'll do, I'll ask."

Ray pictured asking Lieutenant Carranza to hand over forensic evidence for a "psychic" to play with. Oink oink flap flap.

"Was there anything else, Ray?"

Ray shook his head, lying to Fraser. Being a con-job.

"Then, if you don't mind," Fraser said, "I'll excuse myself briefly." In other words, he needed to piss like a racehorse again.

Ray had needed a chance to talk to Vecchio alone, but he'd thought he would get more time to figure out how to say it. Fraser was ten steps away, twenty steps away... Even with his hearing, that had to be far enough. Ray turned back to Vecchio, who was watching him.

"They said Greening said Metcalf told him she was diabetic. Got herself a bunch of hypodermic needles."

"That sounds like bad news for somebody," Vecchio said. He watched Ray, cool and steady.

Ray could hear the slot-machine wheels turning in Vecchio's baldish head. Whir. Ray hadn't said this in front of Fraser. Whir. Jackpot just for him.

"After Metcalf shot you and Stella," which Ray could say straight out this time, "she brought out a black handbag and threatened you. The note was right about that?"

"It was right about everything, start to end, however the Thornes found out."

"Ya never saw what she had in the bag?"

Vecchio shook his head.

"When they took ya to the hospital, did they find any needle sticks on ya?"

Vecchio was still producing the long cool stare but he was breathing hard and harsh, not like sex, like sobs. It was only his face that didn't know he was doing it.

"That was a really dumb question, Kowalski. How would they find a stick mark in the middle of a gutshot wound? Talk about your needle in a haystack."

"You'd already figured out what she did?"

"Like hell I had." Vecchio lay back against the head-rest. Then he shoved his head against it, hard. "You want the credit for figuring this out, Kowalski? All yours. Now shut yourself up before I choke you."

Ray nodded, looked straight out through the windshield, saw no sign of Fraser at the door of the store. Vecchio's breathing was getting under control.

He said, pretty steadily, "You know, Kowalski? I can't even say I'm surprised, not deep down. It feels like I did already know."

Ray nodded, thinking about the fact that Fraser didn't know. This thing the bitch did to Vecchio, it was a bad thing all by itself. But more than that, it was going to slug Ben right to the ground with guilt all over again.

"Don't tell Frase about this," Ray said. "Not yet."

"Don't you either." Vecchio's eyes were hard, green, and intense.

Was there going to be a better time for him to say the other thing? No there was not.

"Something else, Vecchio. Something I made up my mind about this morning. If you don't kill her, I will."

There was that big-time made-man expression again, eyes as flat as Florida but chilly, with a little smirk like something a taxidermist would stitch onto him. Kowalski could see why the Vegas mob hadn't caught on to Vecchio even after so long. He wished the FBI had pulled the guy out sooner.

"Big talk, Kowalski."

"Big reasons, Vecchio."

"What is this supposed to be, some kind of entrapment? Trying to give me some competitive motivation to kill her and do your dirty work for you? Or are you hoping I'll talk you out of it?"

Ray sat there, not sitting still but not launching, and took it. Why not? He'd asked for it. Also every accusation Vecchio came out with broke the mask a little, showed up in his eyes as a flash of disappointment. Like he really, really hadn't wanted to hear Ray say anything like that.

"So listen carefully, Stanley boy -- this is me just about to try to talk you out of it." Vecchio took a breath. He let it out. "That was me doing my best to talk you out of it, so now you're on your own. Me, I don't want to spend the rest of a short nasty life being an ex-cop in prison. Even my Pop didn't raise any kids that dumb."

"Okay, Vecchio. Message received," at least he hoped it was, because he saw Frase coming back, "end of message, end of transmission, signing off. All done."

Vecchio shook his head. "All good things must come to an end." He leaned back again like nothing had happened except the extra sweat marks under his arms.

********

When Ray got drafted for Vegas he'd figured it was a case of, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask how you can be done in by your country." For some reason or other he'd lived through it, though. Now it kept crossing his mind that maybe the whole thing was fate. Frannie going out on that date with Guy Rankin, which Ray would never in the world have thought she'd do... but of course girls didn't hear the same stories about guys that guys did. Him showing Guy ten good solid reasons not to try to rape a guy's sister. Then the feebs blackmailing him about Rankin. Finally the whole Langoustini role blown to hell, butler buttermilk nine thousand square feet of mansion Book of the Lobster and all, all of it blown to hell because Fraser let himself get caught off guard. Who'd've figured Benny of all people would ever make a mistake like that? Fate.

And then Ray and Kowalski played change partners and dance, which was either absolutely crazy or absolutely fated. All of which brought the story up to date with the Polack sitting next to him listening to the scanner, not looking at the car he was sitting in if he could help it, jittering in place with his stupid metal bracelet twinkling, and maybe thinking about shooting Victoria dead.

It wasn't Stanley's business. It wasn't his fate, either.

Anyway, Kowalski was hooked up with Fraser now and he ought to be playing by Canada rules. That was what any partner of Fraser's did. Sure, you let the Mountie know he ought to change his mind about doing some wacky thing, you gave him plenty of fair chances to, but in the end you played by his rules.

Benny looked up from the Tampa map, gave Ray the kind of smile one of those high-school-English poets would call "wan," and tapped Kowalski on the shoulder. Mr. Twitchy didn't jump a foot in the air. Wonders never ceased.

"Nothing?" asked Fraser.

"MVAs, CVAs, some heatstrokes. Nothing at either of their addresses."

"Twenty minutes late now," Ray reminded everyone.

"Quit ticking, Vecchio."

"I'm just wondering what they're up to."

Fraser sent him the pure-of-heart look. It translated as 'Don't jump to conclusions, Ray.'

Ray shrugged nicely at him.

Not that he wanted Dram Thorne to have made a run for it, not that he wanted our friend the witch doctor to be a phony. He wanted Thorne to be a good guy and he really wanted to think he and Fraser could get the cure. But what were the odds it could work that way outside of Dreamland?

His cellphone vibrated against his hip. To his own disgust he fumble-fingered it on the first grab. Sweaty hands.

"It's happening," Dram Thorne said, sounding like a knot tied up tight in human form.

"Tell me all about it. If your phone's good to go."

"It's a pay phone. I called my wife where she works at ten minutes before the hour. I couldn't reach her and tried two more times five minutes apart. The people who answered thought she'd gone to the restroom, but when one of them looked it wasn't so."

"Hold on, I gotta tell the guys." Ray switched to the headset mike and passed the word to Fraser and Kowalski.

"I scryed Ivy," Thorne said. "When she came out of the stall in the restroom, Metcalf was waiting with a handgun. She told Ivy to turn and face the wall and close her eyes. Vee did it -- we'd agreed on that plan, for her to go along till Metcalf gave us more evidence. Then, after a scraping noise and a thump, Metcalf shot her."

"With the pistol?"

"I'm hoping it was the dart gun. I don't know. Vee never saw the weapon that was shooting. The shot wasn't loud, but she fell down right away and moaned. She must have been faking that -- one of the spells I'd already cast on her was a pain-stopper. Metcalf put a hand over her mouth and threatened to shoot her with the handgun if she didn't quiet down and keep her eyes closed. I'm not sure what happened over the next few minutes. There were some more thumping and scraping noises. Then Metcalf hauled Vee up and manhandled her out the door. That hallway's isolated from the work areas, and the restroom is near an emergency fire exit. Metcalf 's car was parked in the alley. It was a a big light-blue SUV, with the brand name and license plate covered with splashed mud. Vee's eyes were closing down all through this, and she passed out in the car after Metcalf told her to lie down in the back seat.

"After a while she woke up and lay with her eyes closed. She sat up just once, it didn't seem easy for her, when the car was pulling into a driveway. She caught a glimpse of the house frontage before the car went into the garage. There was no address number to be seen. Then she passed out again. Vecchio, I don't think that was fake. I'd cast the same purge spell on Vee that I used on Constable Fraser but the first surge of the drug must've gotten ahead of it. Or else it wasn't a dart that she was shot with." Thorne broke off.

"I know. I know." Who knew better than him? "Hold on, okay? Hold on." Christ, this sounded real, he thought they could believe it. He felt almost as shaky as Dram Thorne suddenly sounded.

He passed the story on.

"Ray, may I?" Benny's eyes were big, sympathetic, and guilty.

He took over the cellphone. "Constable Benton Fraser here. Having had experience with the tranquilizer in question, I believe I can assist in distinguishing its effects from those of a conventional shooting. Would you mind repeating the details?"

The story was longer this time through. Benny asked questions about how much blood there'd been, and the answers must have come back good because the corners of his eyes de-flinched a little and he gave Thorne "every reason to believe" that it had to have been a trank dart, not a bullet. He got the time it happened, which was too far back to make it worth trying to chase the car, and descriptions of everything right down to the layout of the place where Ivy Thorne had worked.

"We're truly sorry this has happened, and I assure you we'll do our best to allow no further harm to come to your wife," he said. He cocked his head at the response. "What do you plan to do..? Good man. I know we can rely on you."

He switched off.

"We go to the PD?" Kowalski burst out.

"Do you think that would be to the Thornes' advantage?" It was one of Benny's absolutely sincere questions, and who except him would have needed to ask?

Kowalski did a full-body headshake. "Triffid and Laughing Boy? You can't trust them with freaks."

"I concur. And you, Ray?"

"This is our business and we're gonna do it. The Tampa boys can go chase a rolling donut."

Benny sighed and looked out his window, and up at the sky. Curious, Ray peered through the windshield. The clouds were piling up in the west, graying out the daylight. Nothing strange about that.

"Thorne said he and his wife were both wearing concealed recording devices." That made Ray's jaw feel like it had dropped off its hinges. Kowalski looked the same. "Indeed. Ivy Thorne was lucky Victoria didn't scan her." Benny looked out at the day again. "I hope the Thornes' advantages haven't made them overconfident. Dram Thorne will be off-shift at four-thirty, after which he'll follow his normal homegoing routine. Although the clouds may thicken, true sunset isn't until eight-oh-six. If he's counting on darkness to give him invisibility, he could be out of his depth."

********

The definition of wrongness was, two boys standing in the girls' restroom. Never mind they were grown-up men, never mind they had real cop business. Wrong wrong wrongity wrong wrong.

The bevy of software engineers and bosses in the doorway was getting louder and tighter-packed. Reception-desk Carlotta was at the front of the crew. She looked like wrong wrong wrong was trying to percolate through layers of her brain that were mostly tied up looking at Fraser.

Fraser looked up at the tile ceiling, toward the stalls, and finally toward the garbage bin. He nodded to Ray and pointed up.

"Gotcha."

"Ray? Walk on your toes. She may have left a hair on the floor. We don't want it carried away on your soles." Fraser had gotten a flashlight and envelope from somewhere and was hunkered down shining a beam sideways across the floor. All his weight was balanced on just the toes of his booted feet.

"How'll you know if it's hers?" Ray thought about things that shouldn't go near Fraser's tongue for the taste test. "No. If you answer that, I'll puke."

Ray tiptoed over to the nearest stall.

"Shouldn't you have a warrant?" Carlotta, post-percolation.

"For what? To go to the toilet?" Ray winked at her.

He stepped up on the seat. He made extra sure his feet were too well braced to slip, because falling in would be really high-school.

The ceiling acoustic tiles were on a suspended grid, just like they'd looked, no bad surprise where they turned out to be glued to something solid. Ray lifted one and poked his head through into the space above. No cockroaches, he hoped. He'd heard monster stories about Florida roaches.

Shotgun-looking thing.

"Fraser? Bingo." The crowd noise increased.

"I, too."

Ben's face was shining and completely focused as he tucked the envelope into a pocket. And gave the pocket an extra pat.

"One more thing, Ray." He went to the garbage bin.

Ray got down from the toilet seat and gave the onlookers his attention, which included a glare to match the CPD badge he'd shown Carlotta before she caved in.

"Hey. This is now officially declared a crime scene, so listen like somebody's life depends on it. Which it does. Call the Tampa Police Department. Ask for Lieutenant Carranza," he spelled the name and pronounced it again, because witnesses always got things wrong. "Say a weapon from a homicide case has been found right up there over your heads. Don't come in here till they tell you you can."

"But this is our restroom!"

"Get the guys to give ya part-time on theirs. Sharing is caring."

Some guy started yelling. Vecchio, was who was yelling.

Ray struggled out to the lobby by using lots of elbows, Fraser by lots of "excuse me thank you." Vecchio was leaning on the front desk looking pale and ready to kill.

"She didn't wait for the end of his shift," Vecchio said. "Take this," which was his cell, "talk to it, and get a move on."

********

"Kowalski," said Ray to the phone, scowling as he opened the passenger-side door and an oncoming car swerved and honked.

"Jeremy Thorne." The voice was new to Ray.

"What?" Ray's shoulder got a nudge from Fraser. "Are you some kind of relation to Dram and Ivy Thorne?" Nudge. Ray took the hint and fastened his seat belt.

"I'm their backup. And their husband."

Vecchio did his see-my-pain schtick again, bending and lowering himself into the driver's seat. Fraser was already in.

"That could be a whole different bad conversation," Ray got out, "but now, not. Where are you? What's going on?"

The Lexus reared and sprang into traffic. First came all Vecchio's keys and things jangling, then all the horns and screeching tires.

"Ray!"

"Metcalf showed up at the Center and had the desk call Dram out," said Jeremy Thorne. "She gave him Ivy's fanny-pack with the money and ID still in it, and said Ivy was in the worst kind of trouble and Dram needed to come right away. Dram said she did a pretty good act of being too flustered and worried to give directions. Bring his van and follow her, that was her game."

"Where are you?"

"In the back of our van. She doesn't know I'm there and she won't see me coming."

Ray slapped his hand against the dash in frustration. "Where are you, as in where's your van?"

"Hey! Kowalski! If he's giving directions, the phone is mine! Get on the scanner."

Shit. It made sense.

"No one is following," said Fraser, swiveling to see all the angles. There were lines at the corners of his eyes like a hunter squinting into a scope.

Vecchio took a corner with one hand holding the phone and one on the wheel, fast, but not too obvious. So maybe a traffic cop wouldn't be after them any minute. Ray checked his watch and put on the phones.

Three minutes later, he reported, "They called it in. Dispatch asked about our direction of departure."

"Much good may it do them." Vecchio swung another turn. "Say that again, Thorne."

"Where are they, Ray?" Fraser's finger traced roads on the map.

Vecchio hesitated, listening, and named an intersection.

Sixteen minutes, nine intersection reports, and one unit in distant pursuit later, the engine stuttered. Four curses later it stopped.

The Italian stared straight ahead for a couple of seconds, his mouth compressed to nothing. He came to life and grabbed the keys as Ray reached for the door handle.

"You stay put! And you, Benny." He popped the hood and opened his door. "I know what this piece of shit needs and I don't wanna have to herd you all back into the car before we can take off again."

He was wearing his ice mask again. Did he think the car was going to be intimidated? For that matter... did he think Ray would be? Fuck his orders.

Ray slid out of the car and swung the door hard. It made a gratifying kind of real solid slam. Vecchio stared at him across the car's raised hood and shook his head once, eyes dark and intense. Ray thought crazily it was the best he'd ever seen the guy look. He was standing up straight as a soldier, keys in one hand, cellphone in the other. But he wasn't listening to it any more, he was fingering a remote.

Something... Ray glanced into the car at Fraser. Who was reaching to get out, alarmed, mouth open, saying something in a voice only lipreaders could hear.

Clunk clunk clunk clunk.

Vecchio turned and started running.

Fraser rattled at his door. It stayed locked.

Ray yelled after Vecchio. The sticky air seemed to sponge the loudness out of the yell. There was a thud from the car. Fraser's legs were the only part of him Ray could see. They pistoned, driving the hard-heeled boots against the window. Thud. It didn't break that time either.

"Hey!" Ray ran round the car, checking. The doors were all locked. He called through the window. "Frase! Listen up! Keypad under the dash! I know the codes!"

********

Ray kept running for three of the four blocks and then the air turned to syrup in his lungs. Some of the roar in his ears was early-warning thunder rolling in from the ocean. Some of it was left over from the easy sleazy life in Vegas. No way was he fit any more.

Even so he'd gotten ahead of Benny.

And anywhere the Mountie was stuck, the Pole was sure to stay.

Besides, he was the only one who knew the address.

He sucked air and kept walking. The houses and lots here were pretty big, a lot better than his place had been. The yards were as full of flowers as a celebrity's hospital room. That was because everyone who was outside in the front yard right now was a hired gardener. It wasn't like home on Octavia Street where his family, everyone's family, practically grew up in the front yard like the grass.

Everyone he could see was hot on minding their own gardening business. A man in a light linen suit running full speed down the street? That's just a sign it's time to transplant the honeysuckle.

The tropical flowers smell was strong in the still air. Usually you could feel a breeze in Tampa, offshore in the morning, onshore in the evening. The air never lay as flat as this except when a big thunderbanger was coming. What with that, and the clouds towering up into space, the odds were they were due for one hell of a mess.

And right on cue with that thought, he was at the address Jeremy Thorne had given him.

"Flat-topped stucco house, same color as the inside of a cantaloupe. Has a verandah and a roof with dark-red curved tiles. Plastered wall between the street and the front yard, lighter color than the house. Wrought-iron arched gates at the driveway and walkway. Maybe the wall has broken glass on top, some of them do around here. I'll leave a gate and the front door open if I can. Here she comes again."

Ray paused at the gate, which was open just a little. Like any good trap ought to be.

********

"The codes don't work, Ray." Fraser under glass, being extra patient. "Ray must have changed them."

"Stay there." Ray shoved his hand flat against the windshield for emphasis.

He put on his glasses and saw what he needed two houses down. A chain-link fence was in the way. Ray climbed and jumped into the garden. Crystal ball a foot across sitting on a spidery metal stand stuck into the ground. Maybe Dram Thorne would want a crystal ball, but Ray didn't. He rolled it away, yanked the stand up spikes and all, and ran up the side of the fence like a monkey. Didn't fall on the spiky thing while running, either.

Covering his face and the back of his neck, Fraser ducked down in the back seat. Sorry about your car, Stell. Ray swung the stand against the front side window. The glass made a crazy pattern and dished in but didn't break. Again. Again.

Frase waved, Ray stopped, Frase got up to the front seat and his boots whacked the window. It flapped down on the side of the car like a limp glittery mailbox door. Frase eeled out.

His nostrils flared. "I'd hoped it would be simpler," he said.

"Than what?" Ray choked out, hypnotized by the animal thing Frase was doing with his nose.

"A simpler mixture of smells. The high humidity is a mixed blessing. It does hold Ray's scent, but the local floral essences are held equally well and would be easy to confuse with his floral-based cologne. I believe I can track him, though."

********

Ray poised in the hallway, his back cold with sweat that a couple of minutes ago had been hot. He had that sense of levitation that came along with being furious.

"A hundred thousand dollars." Victoria said it like a winning auction bid.

"That's still no good." Dram Thorne didn't sound shaky now.

Sure he didn't. He had backup. But exactly where was this Jeremy Thorne? The part of the big house that Ray had seen had the lights off and the curtains closed, but this room was brightly lit. Maybe that was a problem.

"I have it here."

Ray heard the burring sound of a zipper, a long one.

"I see it."

Victoria didn't wait for Dram very long before saying, "Do you really want to keep living in a van with two other people?"

"I know of worse things."

"So do I. If the hospital knew what you've been doing, they'd press charges."

"Tell them, then. Do you think that pile of investigation notes you have there would be worth a cent as evidence? People grew healthier than they were supposed to while I worked at those hospitals. Fine. How many other people worked there?"

"None of the others were short of a history." Dram's reaction was inaudible. Victoria went on, "That's right. You and your wife and the tree surgeon -- I can prove that none of you appear in any records before two years ago."

"Our fake IDs don't make me the inventor of a cure for HIV."

"What about the cures in the other places you've been in the last two years? That's the proof. You have a treatment, and I'm not going to give up and die."

"I'm not what you're thinking I am, and I'm done here."

Movement sounds, footsteps approaching.

"Stop," commanded Victoria.

The rain started exactly then, the deep crackle of rain on pottery tile. A bad thing, it covered the noises in the room. A good thing, it covered his own. It might even make the sound of a shot hard to recognize from outside.

"A gun," Dram said, sounding nearer to Ray than before. "That's all it needed to make this idiocy complete." Then, harder-voiced, he demanded, "Where's my wife?"

Victoria laughed. "The penny drops. Move away from the door, go to the far end of the room."

"Considering what you want of me, you won't be such a fool as to shoot me if I don't obey."

"Two bombs are attached to your wife and this is the remote that controls them. It has a dead-man switch. Do you know what that means?"

"I know. Now it's time for you to be proving you have her and she's still alive."

"Of course she's alive. I have to have a living hostage and a safehouse to store her in while I wait for my bloodwork to come back HIV-negative. How else could I trust you? Watch the screen."

Shit, shit, shit. Is Ivy Thorne alive, or is she Memorex?

Nothing audible for a minute. Then Victoria said flatly, "You don't seem surprised."

That couldn't mean anything good. It was time to get her mind off the Thornes.

Ray stepped into the doorway and switched off the ceiling light. "Yeah?" he said, leaning against the doorframe like a sick man. "How about you, Victoria? Surprised?"

Her reflexes were great. Right away she had her handgun on him, the remote in her left hand held out where he and Dram couldn't forget it. Ray took a couple of slow steps sideways into the room. He registered a tile floor, a thinly-curtained window that had to face on the courtyard, a duffle bag long enough to hold a second dart shotgun, a TV, a laptop computer, a soft-sided briefcase unzipped way open and showing cash, no furniture except the TV bench under the window. He didn't take time to make out what was on the tube.

Ray liked the expression on the muzzle of Victoria's automatic better than he liked the look in her eyes.

"We've been tracking the cure-all commando for years," he said. Dram's eyes widened even more than Vicky's did. "Then guess what? We were watching him at the mall and you strolled on by. If I'd known I was going to get you for a bonus I'd've hired a brass band. By the way, thanks for bringing him here. It's a private place where we can pick him up easily."

"Are you with the feds?" Dram asked grimly. He wasn't saying it for cover. God, he was quick to believe the worst.

"You. Shut up. Wait your turn. Your number comes up later." Ray let the Bookman give Dram a long stare.

Then he felt air moving on the side of him closer to the door, just the slightest breeze you could hope to feel.

"The light. It was a signal," Victoria guessed. "You won't live to see the rescue, Vecchio."

Ray took a step toward her, gunless hands spread out on either side of him. "Do I look like I care?"

Victoria looked at him, looked down at him somehow, with the face of the kind of queen who got guillotines invented. She held up the remote.

"There are bombs attached to Thorne's wife's arms. I'll blow off her hands."

Ray took another step, and shrugged. "He'll grow her some new ones."

Victoria looked at Ray and saw Armando, and at Dram and saw no fear at all, and her face changed. The queen dropped away, the long-sentence ex-con slid up into view from whatever passed for her soul.

"He can't do that."

"I see you don't know what a big thing our medical friend here is." Ray smiled like a man who knew how to put the fix on a roulette wheel. "You don't believe me? Maybe you'll believe Stella. Hey, come in, stella mia." He looked over his shoulder at the door.

And Victoria looked too. He'd gamed her and gotten her that confused, that far out of her depth, and it was only right for him to bring Stella into it to help out. It was exactly the right moment for Jeremy Thorne to make his move, or for Fraser to leap through the door and save the day.

She shook her head. "Nice try," she said coolly.

Then her eyes stretched open, rattled back and forth between him and the door. Her face turned white and stiff and sucked-in under the high cheekbones. "No..." came out of her.

But nothing else happened.

Her color came back. "Very, very nice try. Good makeup, too. But don't you think this is going to be a little hard on the actress?"

Oh God. Ray raised his eyebrows and glanced quickly over his shoulder. Nobody. No Fraser in drag, thank God, for an instant he'd thought--

"I guess seeing me shoot your wife once wasn't enough for you. Okay, I'll humor you." Victoria pointed the pistol at the door. Her aiming arm locked straight.

Two people struggled in front of Ray. The man standing behind Victoria had one fist clenched on her gun wrist, the other on her detonator hand. The gun swung side to side, up and down. It didn't fire. Victoria screamed in rage and threw her curly head back with vicious force. The man dodged his face out of the way. The gun pendulumed again and again out at the end of the two arms as they strained, overlapping, interlocked fist over wrist.

Ray jumped to grab the pistol. He missed as the man hooked a foot around Victoria's ankles and brought her down, falling with his weight on top.

"Dram! Shut her down!"

As she twisted around and snapped white teeth at the man's neck, Ray worked at the pistol, prying fingers aside till he could click the safety, wriggle the weapon into his own control. A mile away off to one side he saw Victoria's detonator hand locked within a man's clenched pale-knuckled fist.

Ray gripped the gun. Victoria screamed as he swung and then the metal hammered her. She went lax all over.

He raised the club again and stopped. A man's broad hand was in the way, fingertips pressing against Victoria's head. The tunnel Ray was observing through expanded suddenly, the room rushed in from all around the edges of his vision. He rocked back and sat down thump on the floor, feeling like full-body novocaine.

Dram said, glancing at Ray sidelong, "Her skull isn't broken in any overt way." He reached out for Victoria's right wrist. "Something's wrong here. It's grating."

The man who had to be Jeremy Thorne uncramped his right hand, splaying and closing it, grimacing. "Kept her hand from working the trigger. I didn't do her any good on the other side either. That control box..."

"I'll take care of it." Dram began to work Jeremy Thorne's clamped left hand, cautiously, delicately.

Ray scoped out the new Thorne. About five-ten, tanned, maybe fifty years old but fit. Wearing jeans, a white shirt, two thin steel rings on his wedding finger. He had short straight black hair sun-bleached enough to be a little reddish, gray at the temples. Eye color somewhere between dark gray and brown. A smart tough face, a long angular narrow face, eyes set far enough apart to avoid any weasel look. Broken nose, an old break up toward the bridge, the rare kind of break where the nose had been flattened without picking up a sideways skew. That nose was memorable. Also...

"There's blood on your neck," Ray said. "She bit you."

Shrugging, Jeremy Thorne kept on watching Dram work. "Yeah," he said, and frowned at his uncooperative hand. "She likes dirty tactics. I'm betting she bugged the room in the hope she'd get some blackmail fodder." He had a voice like a lieutenant's, hard to argue back to.

Ray digested that, and thought maybe, just maybe, he was being warned to watch what he said about bites and infections and cures. "You couldn't've grabbed her any sooner?"

"I was hoping she'd incriminate herself more. For our bug."

Jeremy's hand opened, and he flexed it. Dram was gripping the remote now and edging Victoria's limp hand out of the way.

"Your bug," Ray said numbly. "Right."

"I have it safe." Dram's thumb had the remote's button tight down.

Both the Thornes sighed in relief.

"Give the man the bug," said Jeremy.

Dram turned his back, Ray heard a zipper go down, and the waistband of Dram's loose cargo pants sagged as the man rummaged one-handed. Jeremy pulled a notepad out of his shirt pocket and then a Swiss Army knife out of his jeans pocket. Ray stood, reflexively bringing Victoria's gun along with him.

"What's that for?" But, Christ, it wasn't as if Ray wanted to defend Victoria Metcalf, it was...

"Dram, is that one off yet?"

"It's turned off, and it's about to be taken off." The tall man looked over his shoulder, wincing. "And it'll be taking some of my thigh off along with it." A ripping sound.

Jeremy Thorne shot Ray a determined look, opened the scissors in the knife, cut off a few inches of one thick dark curl, closed the knife, put it away, tore a sheet from the notepad, folded it into an envelope, and tucked the hair inside. He did it methodically, like he was giving Ray some kind of training. No -- like he was saying, Here we are, this is what we do, you can see it all right here.

"You don't think the court'll find her guilty, do you?"

"Probably they will." Jeremy stood.

"Here," said Dram, handing Ray an item the size and shape of a thin candy bar. It was painted skin-color and warmed to skin temperature.

Ray put it in his pocket. He felt like the situation was spiralling out of control so matter-of-factly that he couldn't believe it was.

"Give me some of what you had it stuck on with." Jeremy taped the envelope closed and stored it down at the bottom of his jeans pocket. "They might not convict her. Or she could go to prison and pay people to come after us. Or she could talk about us and make somebody else interested enough to come after us when they get a chance."

"But you're gonna let her live anyway?" Ray's numbness burst open into two pieces. Fury. Out of his depth.

Jeremy looked at Ray fiercely, eye to eye. "Aren't you?"

********

Closing his eyes briefly in a sudden access of pity, Fraser leaned his head on the hallway wall and waited for Ray's response to make its way to him across the drumming of rain.

"I've got some better ideas."

"No," said the unknown. "She stays alive. She's the only one who knows where Ivy is."

Fraser waited again. He heard Ray's stealthy approach at his back.

"All clear behind us," Ray whispered, "no ambushes," laying a hand on Fraser's shoulder.

"We're going after Ivy now," the unknown said. "You'd better tie that one up."

"You're staying right here until you explain one thing to me," Ray Vecchio said. His voice said he was holding off confusion with bitter rage. "You. Dram. What was that event that happened right before Jeremy grabbed the bitch? It sure sounded as if she looked at the doorway and saw my wife standing there. How did you do that to her?"

"It was nothing to do with me," Dram said tersely.

"Power of suggestion," the other man agreed. "You set Metcalf up. Her imagination finished it."

There was thunder in the distance.

"Jeremy Thorne," Ray whispered. "On the cellphone. Said he was their husband. Their husband."

"I can't believe you two. What am I supposed to believe? Did you just send Victoria a hallucination, or did you bring my Stella back?"

Fraser listened to the voices, gauging distances and determining who might be facing the doorway.

"Let us go," Jeremy Thorne ordered. "Back off from her. You're going to put Ivy at risk."

"Shit!" The sound of hasty steps. "Don't fool yourself that that trick is gonna get you anywhere. And you -- I have a recommendation here -- don't say any magic words or make any magic moves."

"What moves do you expect me to make? With what third hand?"

"Ray," said Fraser very calmly, walking through the door. "I see Victoria is no further threat."

He saw a number of things. Ray Vecchio: backed against the wall, standing over Victoria with gun drawn, his harassed green eyes trying to watch the whole dim room at once. Fraser tensed. A man who drew a gun without being certain what he meant to do with it was dangerous.

Dram Thorne: gripping Victoria's remote controller, his attention on the gun in Ray Vecchio's hand even though it was pointed a little aside from him. Ray: he'd placed himself well into the room and at right angles to Fraser and Ray Vecchio, out of any line of fire and prepared to take action. A bag of American currency: consistent with Victoria's priorities. An operating television: a woman who might be Ivy Thorne lying contorted in a car's back seat, her head down in the footwell, her arms out of sight under the front seat. Victoria: seemingly unconscious but otherwise unharmed. No one else was visible.

"Some people might say Victoria isn't a threat," Ray Vecchio answered. He met Fraser's gaze reluctantly. "I don't, Fraser."

Thunder came closer.

Ray gestured at Victoria. "Ya want some cuffs on that?" he asked. He'd gestured with the pistol in his hand, a palpably negligent way to handle a lethal weapon. It was uncharacteristic.

"Stay out of it, Kowalski."

Grim stares passed between Ray and Ray. Fraser was startled to recognise rivalry, troubled that he didn't understand it. Any unknown factor could only worsen the situation.

One unknown, however, could be eliminated immediately. He decided to leave the flashlight in his pocket and hold it as a reserve. Instead, he turned on the room light.

In front of Dram Thorne and facing him stood a wiry middle-aged dark-haired man who was tautly looking back over his shoulder at Ray Vecchio. Despite the air conditioning, the man's face and neck were running with sweat, his white shirt half-soaked. There were a number of sweat drops on the tile floor in a broken ring around his feet. It was prima facie evidence that he'd been standing as a human shield for at least a few minutes. He meant no threat.

Apparently Ray Vecchio saw that too. He let out a small aghast grunt and lowered his gun. Toward Victoria, ominously, but at least away from his recent allies.

Dram Thorne grabbed the man by one shoulder and shook him. "God damn you, Jeremy Bun--"

The man's hand covered Dram Thorne's mouth and then lifted away. He laid the forefinger to his own lips. Dram Thorne stood still and simply stared at him with after-the-fact desperation, eloquently enough to make Fraser (at least) look aside in consideration of the couple's privacy. Ray wore a scowl, which might have been envy or simply attitudinizing; Ray Vecchio, a look of dismay and dull impatience. Fraser took advantage of their preoccupation to palm the flashlight; he might need to move away from the light switch.

"You god damn idiot," Dram finally said.

Jeremy put the flat of his hand on the taller man's chest, patting it lightly, almost absently, as he turned toward Fraser.

"Bun? What's that supposed to be? A term of endearment?" jibed Ray.

"No, but 'idiot' is," Jeremy said. He looked at Ray wryly, and at Ray Vecchio worriedly, and then at Fraser. "Are we free to go?"

"Completely," Fraser said.

Jeremy began to move for the door. He sent Ray Vecchio one more warning, anxious look.

As Fraser stepped aside to let the Thornes pass, he said, "Two things, though."

Jeremy as good as pushed Dram through the doorway, then halted.

"What?" He looked up watchfully.

"You may have a time limit."

Fraser hadn't thought Jeremy could look more attentive, but he did. "Why?"

"It depends on the distance between this house and the car where your wife is imprisoned. Unless the receivers on the bombs are within about a kilometre of here, the signal from the dead-man switch would have to be repeated by a second transmitter. If the repeater is powered from the grid, an outage caused by the thunderstorm--"

"Got it. A storm. It figures. Something else?"

"Victoria could have set up booby traps. Check for them at the same time you determine your wife's location."

"Yeah," Jeremy said. "Thanks."

The thunder was both louder and more frequent now. Ray Vecchio yelled over it, "You're gonna cure her, aren't you?"

Dram didn't reply. He and Jeremy were running as they turned the corner of the hall and passed out of sight.

"Cure her of what, Ray?"

"HIV -- what did you think? Yeah, she made you and me into her blood brothers."

If that were true... It could be true. It would answer questions that Victoria had evaded.

"Did she tell you that?" Fraser asked.

"She wanted Dram Thorne to cure her of HIV and as for the rest, come on, Fraser. We're supposed to be detectives here."

The angle of his gun shifted; now it was aimed at Victoria's head. His arm stiffened, a statue's arm ready to kill, and his eyes met Fraser's. The look was nearly reassuring. Labile and bereft of his foundations Ray Vecchio might presently be -- but at this instant he was Ray Vecchio, not the thug or the simulacrum of one that Fraser had glimpsed repeatedly in the last few days.

Fraser took two, three steps toward him.

"No, Fraser."

"He was right, Ray." Fraser said it gently. "What you're contemplating would endanger Ivy Thorne."

"Ah, they'll find her some other way. If there were ever three people who can take care of themselves, it's the Thornes."

"They deserve better than that."

"They'll get it from you. I'm bowing out."

"Ray. This isn't necessary," Fraser said with more urgency.

"You know, Fraser, I don't trust your judgment on this particular case."

"I assure you I want Victoria in prison even more than you do."

"I don't want her in prison."

"Vecchio, this isn't you," Ray said. At this of all times there was something false in his voice. Fraser glanced at him in dismay. "This isn't the good cop."

"What good cop? Ask the FBI. What good cop?" Ray Vecchio laughed. "I know what you want."

"Yeah, you do." Ray reseated his glasses with his thumb.

"Get out. You go too, Fraser."

God, no.

"If I left, what would be the next sound I heard? One shot? Or two?"

"Go or stay, the story'll come out the same." Ray Vecchio's face twisted. "I don't want you to watch. How about granting my request?"

"I don't want that, Ray." So hard to think of anything to say or do, brutally hard.

"It's between me and Stella now." It was said with conviction. "She was here, Fraser, she let Victoria see her. It was a sign. She's waiting for me."

Dear God.

"Ray, how many people has Victoria Metcalf murdered?" Their eyes met again, and held. "We'll probably never know the complete count. How many in the three years since we lost track of her? Her watch is ivory and its motifs are African. Was she telling the truth when she said she'd made her fortune in a Third World country? Had she been trading in blood diamonds? How many killings would that mean? Jolly Hughes -- we know she shot him. Alix Metcalf -- her car accident was too convenient for her sister, it can't have been a coincidence. Stella Vecchio... whom Victoria shot dead in front of a husband who loved her deeply."

"Fraser..."

"Ray. The list of Victoria's killings is already far too long. Let it be complete now. Now. Please." Fraser's mouth was dry. He ducked his head to swallow and looked up again. "Don't add yourself to it. Ray, I want you alive, and I want you to be happy."

Ray Vecchio gazed at him with grief, and love, and that terrible intractable certainty.

"That's two things you want," Ray said, "and sometimes... two out of two is something you can't get. Sometimes you can't get as much as one out of two. Not even for you, Benny."

Ray growled at that. "This is stupid! Stupid fucking stupid! Vecchio, they could drill an oil well halfway to China and not hit this depth of stupid. God, you make me want! To throw! Up!"

"You'd be an expert on stupid." Ray Vecchio bent his head, hiding his face.

"Whaddaya think? Ya blow your head into the shape of a donut and that's what ya want Stella to spend her afterlife with?"

"You're crazy." Voice going colder.

"Ray..."

"Frase, all you do is make him feel noble and that's bullshit." Ray's lip curled back like a wolf's. "You, Vecchio, you are doing two stupid things here. You're making like Stella wants you to throw your brains up on the wall for a true-love trophy for her. That's stupid one."

"Maybe you don't get certain things about marriage," Ray Vecchio said too coolly, his head coming up, revealing a mask that kept both Fraser and Ray in view. "Like the vows about cherishing and protecting and what you do about them even if it's after the fact."

"I get everything about that, more than an asshole like you can possibly believe, and--"

"Show some respect." The gun wavered toward Ray an iota.

"Listen to mister made man talking about respect."

Ray Vecchio's eyes fixed on Ray. Briefly, before swinging back to check on Fraser.

"Cherish, Vecchio, ya don't have the right to use the word. Look at ya. It isn't enough you're trying to commit suicide by cop. You're trying for suicide by Mountie. Suicide by best friend. There's stupid two. Throw Fraser down the crapper while you're at it, why don't ya?"

"He understands things like duty and honour. You don't."

"None of this is--"

Ray overrode Fraser. "Tell ya what I understand? Two things. I have a badge. And Victoria brought her own throw-down. Real convenient."

"Ray!"

"Sorry, Frase." For an instant Ray looked at him like an alien. "But he's got the right to do it and so do I. Because of what we lost, Frase. What she did. Because of you and Stella. And him and me, we know more about this case than any jury ever could. We know nothing is ever gonna stop Victoria Metcalf except killing her, because she can buy trouble for people no matter how locked up she is." His belief flared out of him now and Ray Vecchio was intent on him. "Fraser, ya wanna make it possible for good people to tuck their kids in at night and know they'll be safe? I know ya do. So do I. This case, this one case one time, the law won't do the job. So throw the lawbook out. One time. Throw it hard and throw it fast."

All Fraser could do was shake his head. Words had deserted him as Ray's loyalty had, utterly.

Then Ray pushed at his glasses again with his thumb. Against his nose.

Fraser was still stunned -- differently now, and he could only hope it looked the same.

Ray turned back toward Ray Vecchio.

"Here's what we do," Ray said professionally, "you hold her up like she's awake," he raised his gun, "I'll take care of the rest. I'm a sharpshooter, remember my record? Then her gun goes into her hand, ya get it?" He took a step toward Victoria...

Ray Vecchio's face tightened, his eyes focused like a cobra's on Ray, his gun moved minutely out of line again. But the change in its angle was...

Fraser threw. He threw the flashlight hard and fast, and accurately.

... was enough. The bullet hit the floor. The tile cracked and a puff of ruddy dust rose up through the drape of Victoria's hair. Ray Vecchio sank down across it, his joints giving way a few at a time. Fraser moved quickly and caught him, lifted him and carried him away from the woman.

There would be a fresh bruise on his head, but he seemed fundamentally unharmed. Physically. There was so much suffering that could exist without any physical injury.

"Once a con-job, always a con-job," Ray said morosely.

Outraged, Fraser looked up.

"Not him, Frase, me." Ray poked himself in the chest with three long fingers. "I didn't know if it would do any good if he thought that, that I'd do that. But when ya find a chance to get inside their heads ya gotta take it." He looked at Fraser. "I did it the best I could. Even so he only believed it because he saw you believing it."

"No, I--"

"You believed it, Frase."

Ray's whole body was aiming at him like a hunting dog pointing at game.

"I was taken off guard, and--"

"You. Believed. It."

"Only briefly, I--" It was the truth, but Fraser stopped himself. There wasn't any point, not if he was going to be interrupted again.

Ray simply gave him a blue werewolf glare. Fraser gave up. Sometimes Ray's insistence on exactitude was wearing.

"I knew you wouldn't do it," Fraser said, "but I believed you could. Momentarily. Belief isn't the same as knowledge. Are you satisfied now?"

"Yeah." With a feral grin of triumph. "I'm good with that."

"And we were all fortunate I did very briefly believe you, if as you say Ray's reaction depended on it." Fraser picked up the flashlight, tested it, and stood. Ray's unconscious body looked very lax. "He'll be all right."

"Suuuure he will."

Ray crouched down and latched his handcuffs around Victoria's wrists. He did it roughly, a fact Fraser didn't remark on.

"He'll have a second chance," Fraser said. "Sometimes that's all you need." He could hear his father's ghost saying the same words, but this time he was sure the voice was only in his own head. He sighed. "Ray expected me to have a plan or an insight. A way to call something forth from him that he couldn't reach himself. I couldn't either. Thank you for his life, Ray."

"Yeah. Not like he's gonna thank either of us. Not like I blame him." Ray stood. "This is one of those victories, what's the word, pier, purr, the kind where you might as well lose?"

"Pyrrhic. 'Another such victory and we are undone.' But I think--"

"Winning doesn't light up our lives any, does it? Not mine. I'm as stuck in the dark as he is. Stell's dead. You're infected, he's infected, the gift that keeps on giving. Do we know what Thorne's spells are really good for? Shit, no." Ray fidgeted back and forth miserably.

"Ray. Forget about the spells." Fraser stepped across Victoria's body, casting an ironic inner glance at the symbolism as he did so. "Whatever becomes of the infection, we have years ahead of us." He clasped Ray's shoulders.

"If ya keep away from licking electricity, and falling down crevasses, and poisoning yourself with toads, and getting buried in sinking ships." Ray ran his hands up and down Fraser's sides with a lingering, melancholy sensuality.

Fraser backed two steps, letting Ray's hands slide away.

"I'd better go."

"After Bun? We go. Not you go," said Ray. His objection seemed to be pro forma; it lacked real adamancy.

"But, Ray..." Fraser gestured at Ray Vecchio and Victoria. "We can't both go."

"It's that puzzle about not leaving the wolf and the goose alone together on the same side of the river. Shit." Ray punched the air a few times, expressively. "Give Bun this from me. Not." Then Ray kissed him angrily. What seemed to be a long roaring hour later, Ray backed away. "Call me, I'll have Vecchio's phone, okay? Ya want that I call the PD or not?"

Fraser put his hands safely behind his own back. It didn't stop the palms of his hands from continuing to feel the unique texture of Ray's hair. Blue eyes gleamed at him from a tantalizing distance.

"When you think the time is right, Ray." Fraser caught his breath. "Keep your eye on that screen. Expect to see me there."

********

He found Dram and Jeremy Thorne on the floor of the unlit garage. Dram sat Indian-fashion looking down into the windowpane he'd had in his pack on his first visit. His mouth was drawn up a little in distaste. Jeremy lounged next to him, ignoring the hardness of the concrete floor as a cat would, writing on a notepad. He noticed Fraser and gestured, finger to lips, hand pushed at him -- stay back and silent for a moment.

The dead-man switch sat on the floor next to Jeremy. A tight band of duct tape ran around it. Beneath the tape, presumably, was some small object putting pressure on the button and holding the switch closed.

"Unfurnished, some cheap odds and ends still there, but there's a security system anyway. Alarms send signals. Front door," murmured Dram. "Patio door. Back door. Outside garage door. Inside garage door. She's tested them all, they're all the same, voice deactivated."

This would be the house where Ivy Thorne was imprisoned. A fairly definite piece of evidence that Dram Thorne's scrying was workable.

Fraser found the idea caused him apprehension and, in fact, resentment. The reaction was irrational. He set himself to consider it dispassionately.

The invasion of interior privacy would be an outrage in other circumstances. But if judges were ever to issue search warrants for memories, this search would certainly be a warrantable one.

Nevertheless it troubled him.

More than that, he found himself guilty of an unworthy suspicion that the Thornes would simply dismiss everything that he, and most people, were forced to take seriously. Mortal illness and injury? Spells would make them meaningless. Hidden malice? Scrying would find it out. Traps and threats? Easy to evade invisibly. Could you trust anyone who had reason to think of all these things as... not trivial, perhaps, but peripheral?

His hindbrain apparently answered no.

Then he almost laughed. If those were the only rules of judgment, how many people would trust Constable Benton Fraser? Didn't he himself behave as if--

His attention flashed to Jeremy, who was pocketing the notepad and beckoning.

"She's a block and a half away," Jeremy said quickly as Fraser approached. Dram kept stowing his gear away in his pack. "Close enough to control the bombs without a repeater, but the windows and doors are all wired. It takes Metcalf's voice to shut the alarm system off. I guess she wanted belt and suspenders, two different kinds of security."

"Do you know how to deactivate the bombs?"

"Not yet."

Fraser said, "Write this down -- it might help. It's the deactivation code she used on Randall Greening. 83567843774868." He repeated it.

"Are you sure of that?" Dram asked, standing up.

"Positive."

Dram shook his head. "Was that twelve digits? Or more? How did Metcalf remember it all? How did you?"

"The Art of Memory, like prestidigitation, is a useful skill that can be acquired at any age. I've found--"

"Fine. I'll accept you have a photographic memory. How are you at breaking codes?"

"Are you coming with us?" broke in Jeremy.

"So I'd intended."

There was caution in the looks both Thornes gave him then. Apparently they, like cats, would rather issue an invitation than deal with the self-invited. Without another word, Jeremy made for the door to the outside.

Following him outside to the half-shelter of the verandah, Dram began, "I want to tell you--"

"Not so quick," his husband cut him off.

In the front yard, under the heavy rain, Jeremy said, "Here. Not too close to the van, not too close to the house. She could've bugged either one."

He dashed for the van.

Dram, his long black hair already lank with water, looked with frank exasperation after Jeremy and then glared up at the clouds. Fraser pulled his shirt collar tight. He wished he hadn't left his Stetson in the Lexus.

"Before we're distracted again," Dram said quickly, "I want to tell you -- I cast two spells on each of the three of you today, one to cure hepatitis and one to re-enable the immune system. Unfortunately those are the only spells I have against bloodborne diseases."

"That seems adequate," Fraser managed. The Thornes did in fact have a different perspective.

"It is adequate, under these circumstances," Dram acknowledged. "I'd thought she might have bought a dose of blood that carried something incurable, but I suppose there was nothing worse in it than her own taint. Now -- the hep spell won't be causing side effects. The immune fix spell may give you a few days of symptoms of immune overactivity, but nothing that's dangerous. You may not feel it at all. The T-cell damage can't have started yet so the cure won't be strenuous."

"Did you say... you also cured Ray Kowalski and Ray Vecchio?"

Dram shifted on his feet as if he'd been caught doing something unseemly, and his eyes turned distant.

"There's no telling what chances Metcalf had at them, especially when Vecchio was flat on his back in the hospital with no defence against any needle that came his way."

"Thank you kindly for your... efforts on our behalf."

Lightning interrupted.

"Thanks for your thanks," Dram said, in a tone that enlarged on the skepticism Fraser hadn't been able to keep out of his own voice, "but it wasn't such an effort. Although, what with one thing and another, I'll admit that today I didn't do much of the work the hospital pays me for."

A thumping noise came through the rain roar. Jeremy had his arm out the driver's window and was pounding on the side of the van. Thunder repeated the sound, more loudly.

********

Conversation was nil. All Jeremy's attention was on the lightly-travelled streets; he frowned deeply, as if he were packed into dense traffic. Dram worked systematically through his supplies. Every now and then he opened a small bag and a puff of odour would briefly engage Fraser's attention.

Not that the background smell of the van wasn't of interest in itself. Cooked meat and fish, sweat, pickles, sex, charcoal and wood smoke, tea, human wastes, bleach, herbs, flowers, and resins... Fraser had no doubt the van was a dwelling place, though the presence of a well-worn folded tent -- no, two tents, a large and a small -- bespoke other living quarters as well. The whole atmosphere reminded him of a cabin at the end of a long harsh winter when a full airing-out had been impractical for months. He found it (disconcertingly) charming. That was a distraction to be suppressed.

What was the key to the code? And if scrying worked, why hadn't Dram Thorne seen the key? Fraser pondered it.

"Did everyone come out all right back there?" asked Jeremy, with a brief probing look.

"Excuse me?"

"We heard a gunshot."

"Ah. No one was shot."

"That's far from saying everyone's all right," commented Dram edgily. "Hold on. This is it."

Jeremy parked in the driveway of the big house, which was painted the exact pale colour of chlorinated water a foot deep in a clean white swimming pool. The house's curtainless windows were consistent with Dram's scryed observation that the interior was unfurnished and empty.

"All the structural penetrations are on the alarm system?"

"They are," Dram confirmed. "The alarms are on house power," lightning nearby made the Thornes flinch, "and they can signal in some way. I can't say for certain that the alarms or a break in power would set off the bombs, or that the alarms would contact a security company, but..."

"There's no crawlspace. Are there any motion detectors in the garage?"

"Not in the garage or the house, and there are no glass-break detectors. Strictly a matter of contacts on the doors and windows. Metcalf can't have been planning for men with axes."

"Exactly," Fraser agreed, "but breaking through the walls might tear through a wire run and cut power."

They looked at the roof.

"The tree's good," said Jeremy.

Indeed, the oak tree would serve as a ladder. One of the lower limbs was thick and ran within two feet of the garage roof, at which point it was truncated. Another limb ran almost parallel a few feet above, a natural handrail. However, the tree was draped with Spanish moss and the roof itself had a strong slope and mossy patches. Fraser suspected they'd be slick underfoot.

"Want ropes?" Jeremy asked.

"I've evolved too far to do without them," Dram said.

"There may not be time for rigging." Fraser looked at the storm. So far he hadn't seen the streetlights flicker. The power grid wasn't involved... yet.

"I'm fast." Jeremy rummaged behind his seat and came up with a large canvas bag. He ran to the tree.

Dram dashed to the garage. Fraser followed. He noted a light on the front of the garage over the vehicle door, another over the side door, a covered electric outlet on the wall that faced onto the back yard: clues to the locations of the wiring runs.

"Ivy!" Dram bellowed through the door. "We're here!"

"Dram? Jeremy?"

"How are you?"

"Only one piece!"

"Metcalf is in custody! We're coming in through the roof!"

Ivy Thorne made a wordless, shaky, enthusiastic sound.

Dram leaned on the side of the house and grinned widely like a happy large dog. The rain ran down the creases in his cheeks and into his mouth. He laughed and swiped a hand over his face. Fraser had to smile back.

"This wouldn't have been complete without a storm," Dram said.

"It'll keep us from being noticed by the neighbours," Fraser noted.

Lightning slashed down nearby. Both of them looked up at the tree. All at once it bore a remarkable resemblance to a lightning rod. Admittedly, one of unconventional design.

"They might notice the smell of charred meat," said Dram.

"Only if we don't dodge fast enough."

"Now that's advice to remember."

"Move it," Jeremy yelled.

He'd looped a single rope around the higher limb. The loop was snugged against the crotch of a branch, which would keep the rope from being slid outward along the limb, and he was hitching foot-loops of prusik cord onto the rope. A sheathed pickhead axe, a crowbar, and Dram's backpack lay on the ground next to Jeremy's feet.

Dram picked up the axe and tied its handle to his wrist with one of the cords.

"Wait," Fraser said as Jeremy made to start climbing.

"We're going in," Jeremy said flatly. "You don't have a personal stake in this. We do."

"No offence," Dram added. He said it amiably but his stance changed to readiness.

"None taken. But if you take the lead in this, the charges will be trespass and breaking and entering. Several other charges could be filed as well. If I take the lead, it's an officer of the law entering a residence because of imminent danger. And requesting assistance from citizens." Fraser set one hand on the rope.

He wasn't bluffing or threatening them. He was merely advising that it was essential for him to assume command as well as responsibility. Clearly they took his meaning.

Dram looked enquiringly at Jeremy. "If it'll save us from being sued later, I'm for it," he said lightly.

"Go," said Jeremy, his face tight.

He stepped back from the rope. Fraser took off boots and socks. Dram handed over the axe, which Fraser tied to his wrist. A uniform with a lanyard would certainly have been practical now.

Four steps up, Fraser had to pause to attach more foot-loops. He heard Dram whisper, the words not as quiet or as completely covered by the rain as he no doubt hoped.

"He's something, isn't he?"

Jeremy's response was brief and to the point -- a different point.

"'Citizens.'" He said it as if he were quoting a word in an enemy language. "That isn't us, remember?"

********

Fraser swung the axe once more. The results were satisfying, a completed cut in the shape of a squared-off U through the plywood of the roof's bared sheathing. He leaned back against the upper rope and Jeremy took his weight. Dram nodded, set his feet more firmly into two of the notches they'd hacked for footholds, and wedged the crowbar into one of the vertical cuts. Fraser followed suit on his side of the U, prying at the wood with the pick on the back of the fire-axe's head.

All three of them were as wet as seals. Fraser was chafed by the ropes around him -- one led down to the tree and the other up to Jeremy, who was straddling the ridgeline, acting as a human grapnel. The storm and its clamour hadn't subsided. The air was murky and oppressive with heat and was almost as hard to breathe as the rain falling through it.

But the buzz in Fraser's veins and nerves offset it all. He couldn't destroy Victoria, not within any kind of moral or legislated law, but he was free to thwart her as energetically as was in him. And for now, at least, he had vigour and strength and health and it seemed he might keep them in spite of her spite. He felt an exuberance that was almost maddening.

Crack!

The wood at the top of the cut gave way to powerful leverage. Dram lifted the freed board before it could fall down into the garage. He peered through the hole.

"There's no ceiling," he reported. "I see the car."

They rearranged the ropes. Jeremy bundled his shirt and tied it onto the descent rope as a pad to prevent fraying against the rough-hewn bottom edge of the hole.

"No motion detectors?" Fraser asked again.

"None," Dram confirmed. "And no alarms on the car itself."

Fraser slipped through the tight hole, feeling a splinter catch at his sodden shirt. The garage's interior was delightfully dry, though a musty smell suggested some effect of the omnipresent humidity. He let go of the rope and dropped the last two metres to the floor. The rope end whipped back and forth next to him. Jeremy was starting down.

Ivy Thorne was looking at him through the car window, her face sweaty and amazed. Oddly, she was wearing a kerchief tied around her upper right arm. Had it been a signal to her menfolk?

"It's safe to come out," he told her. She rattled at her door. It was locked.

Fraser looked through all the windows, tried all the doors. They were all locked, including the hatchback.

Jeremy hefted the crowbar over the back window, traded looks with Fraser, and handed the tool over. Ivy ducked down in the back seat and Fraser struck at the hatchback window, hard vertical strokes whose aim was to thrust the broken glass down into the back area of the car rather than flinging it throughout. As he'd expected, the window was tempered glass. It broke like a mosaic, leaving no pointed shards; nevertheless Fraser spread his denim shirt over the glass blebs to provide a safer escape route.

As Ivy emerged she gave Fraser a nervous, flickering smile, and said, shakily, "Sir Walter Raleigh never died?"

Then Jeremy seized her, wrapping his arms around her in what almost had to be a painfully constricting embrace. She put her head on his shoulder and trembled and let him hold her, but she kept her lower arms, cased in metal tubes, stretched out behind his bare back.

Fraser turned away and found Dram staring at his face and naked torso, looking utterly blindsided. The other man turned away hurriedly. Also hurriedly, Fraser turned and shook his shirt out onto the floor so that he could don it again. When he turned back, Dram was holding Ivy gently and offering her a canteen. Jeremy was crawling into the car.

"What--" Fraser began.

"Jeremy!" Ivy called out. "Keep off the floor of the car, it's unhygienic. I had to, um, the purging..."

"Long as you didn't short out your bug," Jeremy said, clambering into the back seat.

"I hid it under the seat belt."

"Constable," demanded Dram, "is there any chance Metcalf was bluffing? That she didn't have any real bombs?"

It was unlikely. The nearness of this house to the one where Victoria had interviewed Dram, and the use of voice-activated security instead of the slower key-pad passcode type, both pointed to Victoria's interest in getting in here quickly. She would have needed that speed if she'd blown Ivy's hand off and wanted to keep her hostage from dying too soon.

But the alternate hypothesis was easy to test.

"Pardon me," Fraser said, and reached for Ivy's hand.

"Wait," she pulled back, "it's unclean, I had my arms under the seat because I thought it would be a shrapnel shield for the rest of me, and my hands got into..." She looked at Fraser, turned red, and trailed off.

He took her hand and brought her arm up to his nose. Fresh urine from a human female, yes, with a bitter taint of expelled drug. Behind that unremarkable odour: butyl rubber, motor oil, a faintly fruitlike smell with ester characteristics, and something acrid.

"A binder and plasticisers," he said. "They're characteristic of C-4 plastic explosive, though the high explosive itself is odourless." The tube on her other arm was the same.

"You'll never be needing any bomb-sniffing dog." Dram looked at him speculatively. "Your hearing is unusual, and your memory, and so is your sense of smell. I'm wondering what else you can do."

"As I wonder what else you can do," Fraser responded candidly.

Dram's dark eyes took on that distance again. "Touché."

Fraser's shirt pocket beeped. All the Thornes stared at him, suddenly wary. But they didn't try to keep him from answering the phone.

"Frase! What happened? You all right?" It was Ray.

"Yes, what did you think happened?"

"Ivy Thorne got outa the car, then Bun showed up. Then he did a reach-out-and-touch with the camera and the screen here went black. You all right?"

"There's no problem."

"Really all right?"

"As were you when I called yesterday."

That should be enough reassurance -- it sounded so much like a code phrase that hostile captors wouldn't have let him say it.

"Great. Okay, great. That's good." Ray's relief was obviously immense. "We gotta circus here, but no troubles. We're all good here too."

"Nor am I surprised," Fraser said warmly. Of course Ray could handle the Tampa PD. "Ray, when I hang up I'll turn off the phone. Don't take it amiss."

"Gotcha. Wup, the Lieutenant wants a word with you. Duck."

Carranza said quietly, "What's happening on that end?"

"I've located the woman whom Victoria Metcalf was holding hostage. Her husband is here with me."

"We've seen him."

"The woman has a bomb on each arm. It's the same kind Victoria attached to Randall Greening. I believe I can disable the bombs."

"Do not risk it, Constable. What's your location?"

"I'll tell you where we are when the situation has stabilised, Leftenant." Fraser paused. "With luck, it won't take longer than thirty-two minutes." He turned the cellphone off and laid it on top of the car.

Jeremy considered him intensely, clearly probing for ulterior motives. There were none. Fraser was sure that the Thornes were outlaws, not criminals. The difference between being outside the law, and being above or against it, was always a hopeful sign. They needed to be dealt with by someone who could recognise the distinction. He doubted that most of the Tampa PD would be willing to do that.

"Here's the bug Ivy was wearing," Jeremy finally said, shrugging.

Fraser accepted the device. "Dram, why wouldn't your scrying spell have shown the codes for disarming the bombs?"

"Disarming." Ivy laughed. "I dislike that word right now for some reason. A disarming new fashion in armaments." She didn't sound hysterical, precisely; shaky and perhaps still a little "spaced."

Jeremy shushed her, putting an arm around her. Fraser recalled Dram's attention.

"When I ask the spell a question," Dram said irritably, "it shows memories that'll provide me with the truth, barely enough of the truth, and nothing but the truth. It's always been a complete answer, before. Barely complete, that is. There's no reason for this case to be the exception." He paused. "And yet Metcalf wasn't bluffing." His eyes went back to Ivy.

"What were the exact words?"

"The question? It was, how do we avoid triggering the bombs Ivy is wearing?"

"What if you asked how to remove them without triggering them?"

Jeremy grunted assent. Dram strode to his pack and returned with it. He sat himself on the floor, unwrapped a glass jar, tipped a little white crystalline powder onto the white cloth the jar had been wrapped in, then soaked the cloth in water from his canteen. He wiped the glass pane with it.

"Sea-salt. That's for cleansing," Ivy explained to Fraser.

"There's rosemary, that's for remembrance." Dram looked up at her, eyebrows raised.

"Ophelia."

"That was an easy one."

"Anything you say. But don't quote the Scottish play, please."

"Of course not. That would be entirely the wrong spell."

Dram extracted a brown glass bottle and a plastic bag of star anise seedpods from the pack, took a little oil from it (oleum Salviae sclareae) on the tip of his right ring-finger, and began tracing patterns on the pane, talking almost under his breath. The methodical syllables made no sense in any of the many languages Fraser knew. The patterns were almost certainly Celtic knots. As Dram spoke he placed one anise star at each of several locations and adjusted them. He seemed to be trying to arrange the points of each star at some proper angle to all the others. It was as if he were putting the cogs back into a Swiss watch.

Arthur Clarke might or might not have been right that any sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic. However that might be, Fraser could now testify that the reverse could be true.

He remained still to avoid interrupting Dram. So did Jeremy and Ivy. Jeremy watched Fraser broodingly, perhaps regretfully. His arms were around his wife, who'd closed her eyes.

Dram stopped. His lips were firmly shut. He looked an enquiry at the three of them.

Jeremy dug in the pack and pulled out pad and pen. "How we remove both bombs from Ivy without triggering them," he restated. "I don't see any loopholes in that. Do you?"

"I might suggest one clarification. How do we remove them from her without triggering them before, during, or after removal?"

Jeremy considered that for a moment. "Good."

Dram poured a little water from his canteen into the shallow dish in the middle of the scrying pane. Barely audibly, he repeated the question.

"She's looking at a laptop computer," he said rapid-fire, "a furnished room. July three three-oh-three pee. Computerese at the top of the screen, two blank lines down, initiate colon a-r-c-h-e, next line terminate colon t-e-l-o-s. She typed those two words, the rest was automatic when the screen...

"Same place and laptop, July three-one miss. Line at the top, roots colon. She types d-e-x-i-o-u, eff three return, miss t-e-r-o-u, eff three. Menu. Pulls down 'Encrypt.'

"Night time. City street. She's on the curb, leaning into an SUV. Someone behind her. Working on wires, a bracer worn by a blond man lying in the back. Oh, then it's... Damn. Missed. Four wires green last. She takes off the shield."

"Back seat, this car. Here. She's put the keypad parts of both bracers on Ivy already. Miss one. 27243274783768, that's the other hand, the left hand. That's all for that pass."

He let out a long breath. He began to stare at the far wall of the garage, as if he had to rest his eyes by forcing them to focus further away.

Two passes though memories later, all the codes and the wire disconnection sequence were complete. The latter was as Fraser remembered from observing Victoria. His last scrupulously maintained doubt about scrying vanished. On the fourth pass, he and Ivy both peered over Jeremy's shoulder so that all three of them could check Jeremy's notes against Dram's re-reading. Finally Dram stood, joints cracking, and made a final review of his own.

83567843774868, to disable Greening's bomb.

27243334968, to enable the bomb on Ivy's right arm.

27243274783768, the same for her left arm.

And the words 'arche,' 'telos,' 'dexiou,' and 'aristerou.'

"It's Greek," said Dram.

"Like Victoria's ancestry. Two words in the nominative and two in the genitive," Fraser elaborated. "That's meaningful. It's also suggestive that the digits 0 and 1 don't appear."

"The odds are against that being random," Ivy volunteered.

"Yes. I believe it means the letters were coded to numbers using the same system as on telephone keys. Then the repeated 68 would stand for 'ou'."

Jeremy made a long arm and took Fraser's phone from the top of the car. Dram was already scribbling on the pad.

"The enabling words on those bombs are 'archedexiou' and 'archearisterou'," Fraser said. "It confirms she encoded with the English alphabet and not the Greek alphabeta, which would have caused chi to appear as a single number. Greening's disabling word begins with 'telos'."

Looking exasperated, as well as relieved, Dram slapped the pad down on the car. Jeremy set down the phone.

"Archaeology," said Ivy, her eyes closed again. "Teleology."

"The words are related, though not as directly in one case as in the other. 'Arche' means, among other things, 'beginning.' 'Telos' means--"

"End," Jeremy said flatly. "So we put 83567 instead of 27243 to get the disabling codes for Ivy. Right?"

"It appears so."

"Do we need to know what the rest means?"

Fraser opened his mouth to say yes, then reconsidered. They'd learned enough to confirm the code was correctly understood; it was germane but not essential to explain that 'dexiou' and 'aristerou' referred to right and left hands; and the slighting allusion Victoria had made to Greening's character, however apt the Iliad reference, really didn't need to be repeated.

"There's no reason to think so," he agreed. "I'm ready to remove the bombs."

"Maybe you are," muttered Ivy. "But, please, someone shoot me now. With a dart, I mean."

"We're all out," Dram told her.

Jeremy moved between his wife and Fraser. "This is my job," he said.

Respectfully, Fraser shook his head. "No. I'd be remiss to let you do it."

"If you do it and it goes wrong, the PD will come after us as cop-killers."

"Unlikely. Leftenant Carranza already knows I was planning to make the attempt."

"It isn't for you to risk it. I made the decision to handle things this way," growled Jeremy.

"Whoa there," objected Dram.

Jeremy rapped his index finger against his chest and sent his husband a stern look. "It's my responsibility," he said flatly.

"Yes, it is." Fraser straightened a little more. "But it's my duty, and my honour."

Jeremy and Ivy both stared at him as if they'd been poleaxed. Dram smiled crookedly at them.

"There's nothing wrong with being backup, Jeremy," he said, with a touch of mockery.

The hot stare sent back at him must have been a sign of history attached to that advice.

Fraser considered all three of them. Finally, and to his relief, he felt true concern for them. Since last night he'd been back and forth between hope and despair more than once; the Thornes' powers had been one of the forces throwing him about.

They'd cure him, or they couldn't... And then Dram did cure him, did it off-handedly from the wings, and did more than that as well.

They'd help him find and stop Victoria, or they couldn't... And then before he could even reach her, Jeremy did take her down.

The extremes had been so great, he'd been so excluded from events, that he'd resented the Thornes as if they were exploiting him for their entertainment. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods...

He looked at the three of them and no longer saw anything of that. They weren't gods. They hadn't done any of it for the sake of the drama.

And he could help them.

"Jeremy," said Ivy. "Let him. Okay?"

Her glance at Fraser was shamefaced, needlessly. It truly was his duty and his honour; those were the finest things in his life.

"It's yours," said Jeremy abruptly. "First we need an explosion barrier."

The best they could manage was to position Ivy under the front of the car, lying prone with her arms extended on either side of the front tire so that Fraser, sitting beside the car, could reach the bombs. She was at the furthest point from the vehicle's gas tank. If a bomb exploded, the tire would protect her head and to some extent her body. Jeremy lay alongside her, holding and shielding her. Fraser set up a jack, found in the back of the car, to keep the two of them from being crushed if the tire went flat.

Jeremy would be the first line of medical assistance. He'd tied the kerchief around Ivy's left arm, the first one Fraser would work on, and he was ready to tighten the cloth to make a tourniquet. That, it turned out, was why she'd been wearing it in the first place. Dram sat grim-faced by the rear tire of the car diagonally opposite to Ivy's, his spell-casting gear ready around him.

Ivy, it appeared, was talkative when she was frightened; or perhaps a residuum of tranquilliser was still affecting her.

"Constable," she said, "would Metcalf have set it up so that if one bomb was triggered, both would be?"

"I don't think so." He was candid with her. "The only point of having two bombs would be to set one off, to prove intent, and still have another to threaten with. That might even mean that one of them is weak, largely for show, and the other one more powerful."

"But... no, it makes sense..." Her breathing was speeding up.

She jumped when Fraser turned her hand over so that he could reach the wires.

"Pardon me," he said.

"Think nothing of it." She giggled under her breath.

Jeremy soothed her, rubbing her back. Fraser slid the metal shell up her arm about a centimetre to reveal the connections. The wires held no surprises for him. He reached for the snips.

"Sounds like the storm is dying down," Jeremy said.

"For now," Ivy answered him. "There's bound to be another one." She froze when Fraser snipped the first wire. "There always has been." She finished in a slightly higher voice.

"Are you kids being metaphorical over there?" Dram asked, with a sound of forced humour. "If you are, stop it right this minute."

Snip.

"No, I'm being meteorological."

Fraser heard her swallow, a difficult-sounding noise. Snip. And snip. He took the metal from her arm.

"Would you rather I finished removing this one?" he asked her. "Or should I take the tube off your other arm first?"

"I'd say... I'd say... first go ahead and complete the experiment on this side."

The thunderstorm did seem to be clearing. The gusts through the hole in the roof had died down before the scrying, and now the rain had quieted to a light patter. The bronze daylight through the garage window had brightened and Fraser had no trouble reading the key-pad. That was helpful; he could continue to keep his flashlight in hiding.

"Hold still. I'm starting the passcode," he warned Ivy.

83567... It might still explode. There was nothing to say it wouldn't wait for a certain number of incorrect keypresses before going off. 274783768. Or it might wait till he tried to take the explosive from her arm.

Jeremy peered around the tire at him. Fraser gave him a direct stare and a jerk of the chin -- get back behind cover. Once that was obeyed, Fraser flexed his sweating hand on the snips, delaying, in fact procrastinating. Then, teeth clenched, he cut through the two bands around Ivy's arm. He could feel when the edges of the snips cut through wires.

He sagged, and gently laid the device on the garage floor. Ivy made an odd small sound, and waggled her freed arm as if to measure how much the weight had lessened.

"The first one's off," Jeremy said tightly.

"That's good to hear." Dram's voice sounded as though he hadn't used it for days.

"Put your right arm further out, please."

Ivy complied, pulling her rescued left arm back close to her as if to cherish it.

"Maybe the nonalgesia and blood pressure spells were wasted, Dram," she said with tenuous breeziness as Fraser began to arrange her right arm for treatment.

"You're babbling, you know," Dram said.

"Oh yes, I know. One thing I can't imagine. What would be the sensation of having a hand blown off if there were no pain and no going into shock? It's like asking about the sound of one hand clapping."

"Don't make your own omens," Jeremy said suddenly and sternly.

"I'm not, I'm just being morbid. Have you ever considered--what I say might not be an omen until you start to think it is."

"Either way, it couldn't if you didn't say it. Shh. He's waiting to put in the code."

83567334968, and the snips. Once again, a success. Fraser leaned back. He suspected he was wearing a foolish smile of overwhelming relief.

"All safe," Jeremy said.

Dram's sigh and Ivy's half-sob were both audible over the rain. Fraser stood, leaning on the side of the car. The plastic-covered packets of explosive on Ivy's right arm had been larger than those on the left. His theory had been correct. He hoped he'd never need another insight into Victoria's mind.

Thunder caught Fraser's conscious attention for the first time in a while. It sounded like furniture being dragged at the far end of the house. Yes, the first cell of the thunderstorm was passing. There was time to think of what might happen next.

Jeremy scrambled out, bent down, and lifted Ivy onto her feet. Trembling and smiling, vital and animated, she turned and held her bare arms up in the air, V for Victory. She was gliding on an adrenaline updraft, Fraser knew. He might have described her as 'handsome' before--in the womanly sense of the word, naturally, and only if he was forced to limit himself to a single-word description. At the moment she was beautiful.

Dram clapped three times, loudly, looking at her and Jeremy, then turned to Fraser and applauded again.

"Yeah, good job," said Jeremy warmly. "Thanks."

His hatchet face was filled with approval. No, Fraser thought, not quite filled; there was an underlayment of the same brooding look Fraser had seen earlier. He classified it as 'hard-headed regret.'

"It was only what was required of me as an officer of the law," Fraser said, pulling at his damp shirt collar and trying to keep his embarrassment from showing.

Three frown lines appeared between Jeremy's brows.

"Maybe we owe you, maybe we're even. But we don't owe anything to the law."

His voice had the same harsh authority that had been in it when he'd reminded Dram they weren't citizens. He strode along the far side of the vehicle. Fraser stood, guessing the elder Thorne's next move, letting him make it. Yes. Jeremy picked up the phone and put it in his jeans pocket.

"I'll mail it back to the PD so you don't lose it for good," he said. "We won't wait for the police."

"You know I can't allow you to leave," Fraser said reasonably.

Jeremy shook his head. "Allow or not. Sorry."

"Your testimony is crucial to convicting Victoria Metcalf."

"We've left you both of our recordings," said Dram. He still stood by the back wheel, but he was wearing his pack. He rolled his shoulders under it uneasily.

"Witnesses would be likelier to convince a jury."

"Us?" Ivy asked incredulously. "Us? Homeless people who have psychic visions and marry by threes? We're going to help your case?"

"Yes -- because you'll be testifying even though it wasn't in your best interest to cooperate."

"If the jury doesn't convict Metcalf, that's their mistake," Jeremy said. "Staying around here and turning ourselves into targets, that'd be our mistake. That's the only one we have control over."

A flick at the side of Fraser's vision told him Ivy had disappeared. He turned, the flashlight came into his hand, and he swung the beam across her last position. She didn't reappear.

"Belt and suspenders," Ivy said, her voice apologetic. "The other version of invisibility is the photosensitive one."

Now Jeremy was gone too, though Dram still stood in plain sight. Fraser hurled the flashlight at the push-button control for the roll-up vehicle door. Flashlight and switch smashed and sparked. Several of the falling fragments bounced off something in mid-air.

"Sonofawhore," from Jeremy.

Fraser sprang onto the car. It gave him a central location to launch himself from -- toward the door to the outside, the windows, the door into the house, all the exits.

"Remember," he called out, "the doors all have alarms that transmit signals."

Dram stood and watched, the corners of his mouth drawn down, his eyes darkly grim.

"Two doors, a window, three people. We can get away before the rent-a-cops come," said Jeremy.

"Possibly," Fraser replied.

He flexed his legs a little, making ready to move. His fatigue was lost again in a fresh rush.

"Dram -- get it done!" Jeremy commanded.

"No." The big man's hair swung with his brusque headshake. "This situation isn't moving in the best direction. We should talk."

"What can he say? He can't threaten us with anything worse than what we'd get by staying. He can't promise us anything we need that he has the power to give."

"I'll do everything I can to help you," Fraser told them all.

Ivy appeared next to the outside door. "No offence... but a Canadian citizen trying to influence Florida law enforcement?" She made a skeptical moue. "It seems like a recipe for futility."

"Is it any more futile than going into hiding? I'll find you and bring you back to make sure Victoria Metcalf is convicted. And if for some reason I can't, Ray Kowalski and Ray Vecchio will."

The sound of Jeremy's breathing stayed motionless at the back of the car. Fraser remembered they'd put down the axe and crowbar there. If Jeremy had picked up one or the other, he'd done it noiselessly.

Dram said, "The circumstances have changed, Jeremy. No one here is predisposed to believe. There's no prophet, no organised hunt, no scryers or gaiads searching for us."

"It only takes one. Metcalf believed it."

"She was a fluke," Dram retorted.

"She was desperate. There's plenty of that around."

"She was an outsider," corrected Fraser. "That's why she was apt to believe that an outsider like you could have the power you have. It would take another outsider to believe it easily."

Dram gave him a narrow look. "Like you?"

"But I get the feeling you think we should stop being outsiders, Constable," Ivy said, pursuing her own line of thought and looking at him straight on for the first time. "Okay -- then if we put ourselves on the inside, won't the insiders become the ones who can believe it about us easily? And there are a lot more of them than there are outsiders."

"It only takes one," Jeremy said again. "Inside or outside, it doesn't matter. Publicity is the problem."

"The best way to defuse... visibility," Fraser said, "is to let oneself be labeled as well-meaning."

It cost him only a small pang to acknowledge it.

"Being considered eccentric also helps. To solve a case, whose nature isn't relevant at this juncture, I once needed access to a mental health facility. It was easy to be admitted as a patient. I gave them a... prudent selection of the truth." Dram and Ivy stared at him, intrigued. He could feel Jeremy's eyes too. He quoted what he'd told the psychiatrist: "At one time I lived in the Yukon, but I uncovered a conspiracy that involved caribou drowning on dry land. Then some gunmen dressed in white came after me with homicidal intentions. The upshot was that I was sent to Chicago. Apparently I'd embarrassed some people in the Canadian government."

Ivy was staring wide-eyed at him now. She wore a small manic smile that reminded him of Mark Smithbauer at the age when he'd been known for practical jokes, not ice hockey.

"There," she said to Dram, "you see? Isn't that exactly what I've been saying we could do?"

"No. It isn't."

"Stop wasting time talking about it," Jeremy ordered. "I won't stake our lives on that."

"We can't keep running indefinitely, Jeremy." Dram rubbed the back of his neck. "We're out of the war zone now. It's history."

"No it isn't." Jeremy's voice was electric with determination. "Not as long as you keep doing your work."

Dram braced. "I'll handle that differently from here on out."

"You don't have to. You're doing a worthy thing. And what you do from here on out won't solve this mess. Even if no one else talks, Metcalf will."

"She's a crazy woman."

"So what? We already agreed about this last night," Jeremy said with suppressed ferocity. "Nothing's changed for the better since then. We've given away too much to do anything but run for it now."

A sliding sound, metal and wood scraping on a hard surface, came from his direction. Fraser poised for action. Dram took a step forward, toward Jeremy.

"We're at a deadlock, right?" Dram said without resentment, his face unrevealing.

"Yeah."

Jeremy appeared. He'd moved to the side of the car, closer to Fraser. He must have done it under cover of the scraping noise he'd caused. He held the crowbar in both hands, letting it point straight down at the floor in front of him. Bare to the waist, he looked like an unmasked headsman.

"Ivy?" he said, without looking away from Fraser.

She said softly, "Oh shit," and raised her eyes to look at Fraser searchingly. He'd seen that wordless question many times before: Are you as good as you seem?

Fraser waited for her. What Jeremy meant her to do, he couldn't guess.

"Jeremy..." She was almost pleading. Then, with resolve, she said, "Peace. Make it peace."

"Then we're staying," Dram said decisively. He tapped himself on the chest as he'd done once before.

Jeremy's mouth cramped.

"Is the tranquilliser out of your system?" he asked Ivy.

Her smile and voice had an edge that proved her correct when she said, "Oh yes."

"Ask the deck," he ordered.

"Look, warlord," Dram warned, "she's cast her vote. Don't push it."

"I don't have to ask," Ivy said, suddenly calmer. "It follows from the answers to questions I've already asked. The constable's trustworthy, from last night -- Queen of Swords. And the reading I did back before we started said that if we meddled with Mr. Vecchio, he'd benefit and we would too. The Sun. He's better off already. We aren't. If we run now we'll end up at the previous status quo, or worse. Staying is the only hope for a change that'll benefit us."

The intensity in Jeremy's eyes flared and damped out. He let out a long controlled breath and brought his hands into sight. He was holding the crowbar with its hook end up.

"It was to pull your feet out from under," he told Fraser, and dropped it clanging. Then kicked, and there was a metal sliding sound. "The axe was already safe under the car," he added, and stepped back with his hands visible and away from his body.

Dram gave a dry chuckle. "Burying the hatchet."

Fraser smiled in delight and gratified hope. Yes. When one tried one's best, it was always possible to... bring the right course of action to light in a way that would convince others.

No. Not always. He hadn't convinced Ray Vecchio, had he? Fraser winced, his satisfaction lost. He slid down from the car.

In passing, Dram slapped him lightly on the shoulder, then leaned on Jeremy with an arm round his waist. But the smaller man's attention was inward.

"Now we have to figure out how to finish this without living to regret it," Dram said to his spouses.

"Prudently," said Fraser, reminding them.

"Not prudence as much as blarney," Ivy said back, but she wasn't looking at him. She was watching Jeremy.

He roused from brooding and looked back at her, smiled thinly and without any brightening in his eyes.

"I guess we'll see," he said. "While there's life, there's hope." He pulled the cellphone from his pocket and handed it to Fraser.

"Before I call in," said Fraser, "I'd like to ask one question." He looked at Dram.

Here comes what he really wants, said Jeremy's unmoving brown-gray eyes.

"It's the question Ray Vecchio asked," Fraser said. "Are you going to cure Victoria Metcalf?"

Dram looked betrayed. "Are you setting that as a condition for your help?"

"Not at all."

"The answer is... I don't know yet. It's a fifty-fifty chance."

Fraser cocked his head and let the silence press its own question.

"I never use healing and curing as a way to pass judgement. Count on that."

"I shall," said Fraser, who was sure he could. He opened the phone.

********

Either Morland was off the Tampa program now, or else he figured showing up here at the bowling alley would be one possible cover-breaker too many. Peckham was the fibbie du jour, a stocky guy with a snub nose, red hair, and a weak version of a Kennedy family accent. He called himself a "loan consultant." Emory was the "buyer." His accent was Midwest. He was nondescript. He was an one-time street monster, in Ray's unexpressed professional opinion. Emory was only here in the office today to spend an hour signing some parts of the purchase contract and initialing some others. Then he'd be the "owner," and maybe someday he'd be leaving his blood on things instead of his ink, all for the greater glory of the FBI. The poor sap.

The two new boys in town didn't exactly practice the fine art of conversation. Ray didn't object to being on the outside of fibbie business, but he resented not having much to do at the moment except think about things that weren't a few of his favorite things.

He'd forgiven Benny a lot in the past and, being even more of a sap than Emory, he'd probably forgive this last thing too. He was inching up on it like that old riddle about winning a race even though you went only half as far each step as you did the step before. He wasn't there yet, though.

It wasn't like the Mountie had noticed it. No, that was a lie, Ray knew from the Canadian-style side-glances and the extra-special courtesy that Fraser was bothered by Ray steering clear of him as much as possible. But Fraser was a busy little bee. He was running around like a fairy godmother with her tail on fire, doing lightspeed detection to make sure the cops paid more attention to the Thornes' alibis and character witnesses than to their evasions. Not an easy job to keep that trio out of trouble.

"Hey." Emory pointed at the office window.

Since the great event, Ray'd had to chase off a lot of different types: witch hunter, witch groupie, witch wannabe, reporter, lawyer, and general smartass. First they'd been after Dram. But Dram kept up not talking except to cops -- them he'd tell exactly what he did to cast a healing spell, but he wouldn't give any demonstrations or name names of who he'd done it to. Then the visitors switched to a more interesting target, because Ivy kept up talking to anyone and everyone, claiming she'd cast some healing spells herself. Ray'd heard her outrageous New Age spiel so many times that even he was starting to think she was a flake and Dram along with her. It seemed to be the general opinion. The visitations were getting fewer every day.

The guy peeking into the window at the moment had that witch-hunter expression, a sphincter for a mouth. He was wearing a cheap black suit, so he was probably a save-their-souls-from-themselves type. Ray gave him an ominous stare and grabbed the cellphone to stir up the rent-a-cop. No need to call, it turned out -- the guard showed up all of a sudden right behind the missionary man. Ray closed the blinds on the resulting argument.

"Are the psychics still camped out here?" asked Emory.

"As of this morning, yeah."

"They're going to hafta leave when I take over," the new owner said.

Peckham smiled professionally. "I have to agree... It's usually better to start a new endeavuh without being tied to any pre-existing informal arrangements."

"That must mean you want them to get their nasty homeless asses outa here, right?" Ray smiled a Bookman smile, which wasn't all that different from an FBI smile. "And that must mean you can't think of any way to use them."

"Are you saying you think we could?" Peckham raised an eyebrow.

"They were bait before, weren't they? In my experience, people in your business can always find a use for bait."

"Bitter, bitter. I thought you were about to tell me you believe they really have strange powuhs, and the Truth is Out There."

A breeze blew by Ray. He leaned back, laughing silently without smiling. Down underneath the cover laugh he had a real laugh going. The fed wasn't showing any sign of interest in Thorne magic, and that was exactly the question he and the breeze had wanted an answer to.

"How good are they? Did they already tell you today's news?" Peckham asked. "About Victoria Metcalf?"

"A simple ordinary loan consultant like you knows the latest cop news?"

The feeb reared back a little at the tweak to his cover. "I have strange powuhs of my own." His accent broadened as if it was making fun of itself. "She got up first thing this morning and confessed, so right now..." He swooshed his hairy hands like a stage magician over a top hat. "Yes, I see what she's doing right this minute, she's kissing huh ahhs goodbye."

Emory broke out laughing. He was one sad fibbie-whipped excuse for an ex-cop.

Fun was fun, not that Ray was having any fun all of a sudden, but business was business. He finished it up and didn't stand up when his guests did or show them to the door. Save the politeness for the Canadians.

And the Thornes. When the fibbie and his sucker were gone Ray opened the door so anybody could get out, or in, without having to move it.

Jeremy said, almost in a whisper, "It can't be true. Unless she's up to something."

"What are you doing, reading my mind?" Ray shot back, also softly. "Of course she's up to something. She's trying to keep huh ahhs out of the electric chair. Give me a minute here, I'm gonna check this out with my contacts."

With the door closed, alone in the office, at least he was pretty sure he was, he stopped right where he was standing and took deep breaths. Victoria was trying to save her rotten miserable psycho bitch life and he wasn't going to let that happen. He was angry in the helpless way Armando never allowed himself, and the air around him felt weird, and what could he do to stop Victoria anyway? Nothing but the whole thing of getting in touch with pro-electric-chair lobbyists to push his cause, for whatever good that'd do.

He'd missed his chance because of Fraser. And Kowalski. But the less said or thought about the Polack, the better.

Benny did what Benny being Benny had to do. Ray hadn't gotten far enough ahead of him. It was his own fault.

Maybe Peckham had just been dicking around with him, anyway. He had to find out before he started bouncing off the walls. Or taking pain pills.

Who was he going to call? The Tampa PD? They weren't going to be Chatty Kathy about this. Besides... the Tampons might want to know where he'd heard the Vicky news bulletin, and that was not so good. If he called his lawyer he'd get confidentiality. There was the ticket, a lawyer.

"The agent was telling the truth, Ray," said a familiar soft voice.

Ray's knees dropped him down into the chair just like that.

"Don't stroke out. I want to talk with you."

He looked up at Stella.

She was wearing the gold-threaded pale gray Armani suit she'd been -- oh, God, the suit she'd been buried in. Her hair and eyes shone cleanly, and her face was confident, keen, and wistful at the corners of the mouth.

"You look like an angel," Ray said, swallowing.

She laughed. "I'm glad. Because you're seeing me as you remember me."

Ray rubbed his eyes. Some of his ideas, or really hopes, looked a whole lot less believable all of a sudden now that he really saw Stella. Stella's ghost. He was a detective, he could see what was standing right in front of him.

"You haven't come to take me with you, have you, Stella mia?" he asked. "Last time I thought you had."

"Don't be such a romantic, Ray." But she smiled lovingly and sat on the edge of the desk very near him. "Everyone dies alone. That sounds like a hard truth, but... you'd be surprised."

"Hey, I like surprises."

She laughed at him, not at all unkindly. "Funny, I hadn't noticed that about you."

"You'd've figured it out. In time." He swallowed again.

"I know." Now the wistfulness was everywhere in her face. "But that particular surprise is one you have to put off for a while, Ray. Really."

He bowed his head. Stella had usually been hard to argue with, but it was completely impossible now that she had the authority of the afterlife. When he looked up again, she was pulling her hand away from his cheek. He hadn't felt anything.

Ray looked at her a long time: white-gold hair, blue-silver eyes, softly-flushed skin, a smart, brave, genuinely classy lady without any of the all-dollars-no-sense attitude that usually went with a Gold Coast pedigree. A once-in-a lifetime woman. He loved her and probably he wouldn't ever see her again. This time, at least he got the chance to realize it could be the last time. Feeling a little dizzy, like she'd made him feel so many times (not enough times), he reached out.

"Don't. You can't," she said sadly. "I'm not completely here."

"So you don't even get touching privileges?"

"Ray. I can't stay long, I'm on break from business."

"Business?"

"I don't know whether I'm in Purgatory or something upscale of that. " She shrugged. "That's nothing new or unusual in a prosecutor's existence. Now listen to me, Raimundo mio."

********

The battered walls of the long hallway were cream-coloured and the trim blue. The bars of the cells were also blue. The colour scheme was psychologically devised to be soothing. Fraser found it ineffective.

Walking beside him, Lieutenant Carranza said, with superficial mildness, "The matron and the nurse say she's been talking to herself and acting as if someone's in the room with her. I think she's preparing for an insanity defence, something to cancel out her confession and Greening's story. She could make herself pitiful to a jury. Look for clues to what she's planning."

"Agreed."

He could hear names called out, signal bells, heavy doors closing, locks latching. The acoustic tiles of the ceiling didn't keep the sounds from being sharpened when they rebounded from the hard walls. In aggregate they took on a kind of rhythm, as if they were echoes of his own footfalls.

Carranza stopped by a closed blue door -- a solid one, not one of the barred gates. The schedule sheet beside the door was headed, "Division III Inmate Interview Room 1." The current time-slot read, "Fraser-Metcalfe." Hyphenated as if they were married.

Fraser had expected more time to make himself ready for this confrontation. His heart was prepared; he knew that by now; but his mind wasn't.

"This isn't the time for more of your self-reliance," Carranza said.

"Without that quality, duty would mean very little," responded Fraser with a touch of defiance.

"No," the lieutenant said. "No generalities. I'll be specific." He paused, a man about to say something against the grain. "I understand that your motives were good and that you knew your own resources well enough to judge how to deal with Metcalf's tricks." Having admitted that, he seemed able to speak more easily. "This is a different kind of chaos. There are international implications and you don't know the repercussions. Don't make her any offers. Don't make any deals with her. Your arrangement for the Thornes is enough."

"Is it?" Fraser asked sharply.

"Yes, they're cleared." Carranza unbent. "They've been good citizens in their way," he said, a little disdainfully, a little indulgently, glancing over his shoulder. "It would be a good plan for them to take their false IDs elsewhere."

Fraser nodded to that.

"Psychics." His tone was unchanged. "Even the very few who can really do it aren't much help because they play too many games. It may be the same problem as for cops who spend too much time undercover."

"Never having spent much time in either role," Fraser said with hostile precision, "I'm in no position to judge."

"You will be if you stay in the closet." Carranza's brown eyes were hard.

"If I were to do so." Fraser put himself at parade rest. He would not respond to goading, not about Ray Vecchio, certainly not about himself and Ray.

"Understand me. I don't appreciate that way of life but I don't apply any penalty to it, not a thirty-two minute penalty, not even one minute. But understand that an officer in any service should be sure to keep from having his personal life used for leverage."

"Understood. That kind of 'leverage' did not affect any of the decisions I made in this case."

"Or any future decisions?" Carranza gestured at the door.

"No deals. No offers," Fraser said. "If I told her I wanted to help her in any way, she'd know it was meaningless."

"Meaningless? But not a lie?"

"Exactly."

The odour of the jail broke in on Fraser, something he could half-taste as well as smell. He refused to let himself catalog all its constituents. It was as unclean as the fetor of the deep city, but with less complexity and with more metal in its overtones.

"She's been brought from the infirmary already," Carranza said, stepping away from the door. "Remember."

Fraser nodded again, and entered.

The feel of the doorknob in his hand was like a malediction. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling had an almost subliminal 60-cycle flicker and hum. The floor of the room was clean linoleum and not entirely level. The table was bolted down. The chair was blue...

No. Fraser brought his evasive mind to heel and looked directly across the table at Victoria.

"Here we are again," she said bitterly. Her voice was still beautiful.

This room was different only in colour from the one in Alaska where he'd talked with her, very briefly, after he'd first turned her in.

"I know," he said, with effort. So much pain since then, and this waste was the only result.

Her dark curling hair had been cut short. Her cheekbones had become hollow instead of elegant, and the crescents of soft skin under her eyes were darkened and crinkled. She shifted on the hard chair as if her joints hurt. The prison jumpsuit exposed her scarred hands and the remnant of a rash on her arms and neck. Even at her weakest point in Fortitude Pass she'd had something, some kind of bone-deep vitality, that she lacked now.

Fraser said, "They told me you'd been unwell." At once he realised his voice had given him away.

"Does that gratify you?" she flung back accurately.

"Yes. They said the symptoms resembled immune system overactivity, which they wouldn't expect with HIV infection. You may find your former antibody and T-cell tests are... poor measures of your true health. Hypothetically, they might always have been false positives."

Victoria stared at him, flung her hands out in despair. "What does that matter now?"

In spite of everything, in spite of his certain knowledge that her vulnerability didn't mean she was helpless, Fraser was torn by her misery and hopelessness. He thought that, in fact, she had never had true hope. Instead she'd had will. Perhaps the two weren't compatible, and perhaps her will had gone for now.

"They told me you'd confessed," he said.

With a jerk of her head, she said, "To everything since I was last released from prison. Alaska, Chicago, Freetown, St. Barth, Tampa."

Fraser translated places into people to the best of his personal knowledge. Alix Metcalf. Jolly Hughes and Diefenbaker. Finally, Stella Vecchio.

"Did you do it on the advice of your attorney?" he asked cautiously.

"A lawyer insisted on it."

She glanced over her left shoulder. It reminded Fraser of Carranza's mannerism; the difference was that Victoria's eyes were fearful, not habituated. Then she stared at him again, this time with a pulling intensity as if she was willing him to read her mind and hear something she was afraid to speak. She leaned forward.

"He can do cures," she whispered. "What else can he do?"

"I couldn't say." Fraser sat straight.

"I've already confessed. No insanity defence. No attempt to discredit the cops. No trouble for any of the witnesses, including him. Do you think that will satisfy him?"

"Are you proposing a deal?"

"No." She threw a frantic look behind her. Fraser saw the wall there, nothing else. "No deals about any of that. I don't have any choice now. Not unless he can help."

Fraser shook his head, puzzled. He knew she wouldn't try to use him to send a request for escape assistance. She wasn't a fool.

"What do you have in mind?" he asked, fishing.

Victoria whispered even more softly. "He can do cures. Can he do exorcisms?"

********

Ray waited. He walked around the rental car checking for new dings. He sat and listened to the Spanish-language radio stations and tried to learn the language. He got out and looked at the clouds and made bets which one would grow the fastest. He stood up on the hood, stared at the jail across the street, and waited to see if someone would escape. In between, he worried about how bad Fraser was going to be torn up by Victoria.

Something interesting finally happened. A Riviera rolled into the lot like a zombie back from the grave. Where did Vecchio find them all? 1-800-CHARITY-CARS? This one was even the same boring head-of-the-family green color as the one that had gone sizzle sizzle glub glub in the Lake they call Michigan.

Ray intercepted Vecchio before he'd stood all the way up out of the driver's seat.

"What the fuck are you doing here?"

"Waiting for Fraser, just like you," said Vecchio calmly from behind his fancy-ass sunglasses.

"How'd you know he was here?"

"I have friends in high places." The corners of his mouth lifted a little. He shut the car door.

Here was the guy who'd been giving his best friend stink-eye ever since V-Day. He didn't have any business here. Frase had enough trouble today having to share air with the Metcalf bitch.

Ray told Vecchio all that, bluely. The Italian shook his head slowly, just as if he'd really been trying to make peace, ha ha fat chance, and turned his back.

"Hey--" Ray bounced in front of Vecchio, where there wasn't any ignore-space.

"Shut your mouth," said Vecchio, not sounding so calm. "We aren't on conversing terms."

"Why not?" Ray sent Vecchio a dose of teeth that nobody would be stupid enough to think was a smile. "Cause I kept you from eating your gun? Awwwww."

Vecchio rocked back a little and suddenly looked taller and maybe older. His face went still, but not exactly like the Bookman's.

"You, punk," he said. "Tough guy. Undercover guy." Ray knew Vecchio was thinking back to how con-jobbing had tricked him. "I wonder how long you'd have lasted in Vegas? If it'd been your job."

That was what he'd been suicidal about? Not that he hadn't protected Stella? Lousy shitty priorities.

But maybe that was the point. You didn't know what your priorities were any more when you got off the undercover gig, you had to de-gig first. Ray knew about that, if anyone did. In fact he figured he owed Vecchio a straight answer, if anyone did. Straight Vecchio to Vecchio.

"Five minutes, tops," he said honestly. He wasn't flexible the way Vecchio was. Flexibility was a bad thing in a cop some of the time, but when you really needed it there wasn't anything else that would do the job.

He could see Vecchio chewing on that answer. "So ask me," Ray said, "how long I'da lasted after the Vegas job if I'd got out after as much time as you spent there? Five days. Maybe."

Vecchio made a painful kind of laugh. "I almost didn't make five months."

"Tell ya what," Ray offered. "Come see me in five years. If you're still having those bad thoughts I'll kick your ass up around your ears."

He'd thought Vecchio would laugh again or else snap back at him. No.

"For Fraser's sake, you mean," the other man said.

"Ya got it."

On that note, Vecchio just shut down. He pushed his sunglasses tight up against his eyes, leaned back against the Riv, and looked at the sky.

Tough luck, Ray thought. Vecchio loses Fraser, Kowalski wins Fraser. Maybe in your next life, buddy.

A cloud went over the sun. Something about the shadow made it hit him -- how tough it could be to be Fraserless, just how bad it could be, and he stopped gloating right in his tracks. Maybe Vecchio wasn't willing to cave in and play for the home team, but did that say he didn't need Fraser? It did not. Sure, Ray couldn't feel bad about having Ben, not in this universe. But he didn't like winning so much any more.

Vecchio was still quiet. Ray took the opportunity to walk around the Riv, inspecting it. It was genuine eye-candy but the GTO was curvier. No comparison. Besides -- lower horsepower, weight like an elephant pregnant with triplets, dumb-ass louvers on the trunk lid to suck rain back into the car ventilation.

From the other side, he called out, "Is this the car ya said I was gonna drool over? I gotta bad case of dry mouth."

Vecchio came to life. "Kowalski, there isn't a piece of clothing you're wearing that's good enough to polish this car with."

"That so?" Ray came around the back of the car. "How much ya pay?"

"Twelve. They wanted fourteen but I beat them down."

Ooh, that was so impressive. "I bet I can spend half an hour looking at this and find at least another two thou worth of what needs fixing."

"How much?" Vecchio was glaring in green. "How about fifty?"

"You're on. Move this heap over there, it hasn't dripped oil all over that space yet. I don't wanna go under in all this mess."

Twenty-five minutes later Ray was flat on the concrete looking up at healthy drip-free Detroit metal and losing hope. Some temper, too. He'd figured it would liven Vecchio up to lose a bet, but it was turning out to be the wrong giant pain in the ass kind of livening.

"I think a suction is developing in my wallet," Vecchio said. Then, "Hey! Fraser! Over here!"

Ray started to sit up and stopped in time. Accident waiting to happen. Anyway, probably Vecchio was making it up to distract him.

"Ray!" Fraser sounded fine. Bootheels clopped nearer. "It's good to see you."

"Even though I've been acting like the world's biggest loser? I shouldn't have been giving you the cold shoulder like I was a kid with the sulks. You did what you had to. Life's too short, Benny, I'm sorry about all that."

"Don't, Ray." Fraser's voice was warm and relieved.

With all due care Ray started to wriggle out. They had better not be hugging each other like Vecchio liked to do. The sneaky bastard.

He stopped where he was. No, he was not giving up his chance at fifty bucks. He checked his watch.

"How did you know where to find us?"

"Stella told me you were here."

Ray did hit his head this time. After he could see straight again he decided he must be remembering something nobody actually said. It was like the mirror version of getting amnesia from a hit on the head.

"Are you all right, Ray?" Fraser was crouched down looking at him.

"Don't butt in, Fraser." Whoa, did that make any sense? "Are you all right? Did she try anything?"

"I'm quite all right." Okay. His voice wasn't wearing the serge. 'All right' was real. Big relief.

"Is my Riv all right? If you busted the drainpan I'll gonna find some part of you to plug the hole with."

Fraser's face went up and out of sight. "Ray..." He sounded worried.

"What?" Vecchio blustered. "Is a man supposed to be ashamed of talking with his own wife?"

"Hardly, Ray, but..."

Ray slid all the way out, sat up, and pulled his teeshirt down. "I don't believe this."

The clouds were heavier now and Vecchio had taken his sunglasses off. He looked down at Ray with world-class red puffy eyes.

"Why not, Kowalski? Because she didn't visit you first? Aww."

Ray started to push himself up. First? Wait, 'first' implied a bunch of other numbers. He stayed sitting down.

"I do not believe this weird shit," he said loudly.

"She appears to have been visiting Victoria, too," said Fraser. He made it such a neutral statement it almost didn't exist. Then almost the same way, but plus some grimness, he added, "I believe Victoria is considering longer-term consequences of her crimes than she has in the past."

"Yeah, that's my Stella," Vecchio said proudly. "She's right on the case."

While Fraser was speechless, Ray stood up. He glared at Vecchio. It did not look like the guy was woofing him. But maybe he was just full-bore crazy in a different way than gun-eating.

"You're taking this very... reasonably, Ray." Fraser was looking like he had a micrometer and was trying to figure whether Vecchio had gone out of spec.

"Every day, in every way, I'm getting more and more Canadian." With one of those made-in-Italy shrugs.

"Why... thank you kindly," said Fraser after a pause.

Ray broke in. "Do you really believe this, Vecchio? What if it's something Dram Thorne did to everybody's minds?"

"No. Stella straightened me out too much. He couldn't've set that up."

"You'd have to be put on the rack to straighten you out."

"Says the bent guy."

Ray stared Vecchio in the face. Pot? Kettle? Vecchio stared back. His look laid it out -- if I don't live it, you don't tell it. And maybe Vecchio's eyes were even saying please.

It was a deal.

Out loud Vecchio said, "Seeing is believing, Kowalski. When Stella gives you your turn, let me tell you you better treat her right. And I'll warn you up front--she won't stay."

Right then the Italian didn't look like a widower, he looked like a guy who'd been dumped. By the Stella. Ray knew that look from the inside, so maybe there was something to this ghost business.

Fraser was looking back and forth between the two of them, and his eyebrows had gone up a hair or two. Ray would've said that look was jealousy, both directions. Different shades of green, of course, but still the old monster. Ben always had had that reaction to Stell. Ray scored the ghost-is-for-real column a couple points higher.

Stell could be dead but not gone. That was... good? That was practically religion. That was so much not a thing he wanted to think about right now. Wait, see what happened, deal with it on the spur of the moment. Flashes of inspiration, that was what he was good at.

Could you see a ghost? Could you dance with a ghost? Could you talk to a ghost without getting into a yelling match?

"Lunch," he said loudly, inspired to change the subject. "Where's good?"

Vecchio jumped on it. "There's a Jamaican place a couple blocks away. We could walk there--it'll blow the jailhouse stink off you, Benny."

"That'd be a very great relief, Ray." Fraser paused and caught Ray's eye, and Ray saw a boatload of gratitude for the change of subject. Ray grinned back, and Fraser cleared his throat and continued. "Perhaps we could stop by the alley afterwards. I'd like to talk with the Thornes."

"Sure, sure."

Fraser loosened his uniform collar. Uh-oh, the loosening of the collar.

"Might I ask both of you -- what are your views on magic? Ah -- your religious views?"

Ray gaped. "What?"

"Well, Benny, the whole reason I invited the Thornes to stay at the alley was to have them redecorate it in pentagrams and virgins' blood, you know?" Vecchio smirked at Fraser.

"Not the Thornes specifically, Ray." Fraser cracked his neck. "Witches in general. Witches, wizards, sorcerers, mages, thaumaturges. Would it be against your principles to associate with one, hypothetically and nonspecifically?"

"As long as they don't do it in the street and scare the horses, I don't see a reason to call in the Jesuits."

"And you, Ray?" Ben gave him a very blue earnest look.

Ray thanked Vecchio silently for giving him a minute to think. "No problems, Frase. No problems, not any shape, size, or color."

Fraser sighed and straightened up. Even more so. "The only remaining hurdle is the possible impropriety. Of course it would be only the appearance of impropriety, but that'd be sufficient. It's an abuse of an officer's position to obtain material benefit by intimidation or the offer of a quid pro quo, for example, asking for some favor in return for having given assistance in an official capacity. Given my recent relation to the Thornes it might possibly..."

"What, Frase?"

"Ray -- Ray -- in your professional opinions, would it be improper for me to ask Dram Thorne to try to teach me to cast spells?"

Ray's eyes bugged out at Fraser in oh-shit panic. Over in the blurry out-of-focus part of his vision he picked up Vecchio doing the same. The trouble Fraser got himself into every day just by being a Mountie, that was front-page bad news. What he could get into by being the Canadian answer to Gandalf? You could scare the shit out of yourself just by thinking about it.

Or. Or it could be one hell of a ride. Warily, Ray started to grin.

End The Shade by Victory Made by mnervosa

Author and story notes above.

Please post a comment on this story.
Read posted comments.

The Due South Fiction Archive Entry

The Shade by Victory Made