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  Paxton hadn't known that Blowdell meant the "missing" descriptor to transmute into "found murdered." A missing blonde daughter of a socially prominent millionaire who subsequently turned up dead would have whipped the media into paroxysms of overkill. A skilled operator like Blowdell could have ridden the grieving father like a surfboard on a wave of frenzy, straight into the governor's mansion. From there, Blowdell had intended to position Paxton for the next big wave, whose froth just might have carried them into the White House; once there, Blowdell meant to somehow use his insider position and infernal connections to rule the world.

  Chesney had put a stop to that. Now Nat Blowdell was just another damned soul in Hell. Xaphan had wiped away Poppy Paxton's memory of the incident, as well as that of a Major Crimes Squad lieutenant named Denby, Police Central's liaison with C Group. But the young woman's emotional trauma was too deep-seated, so Xaphan explained it, that he couldn't "clean her up completely widdout she's gonna lose some of her marbles."

  Faced with a suddenly depressed and nervous daughter and the mysterious disappearance of his key campaign adviser, W.T. Paxton had abandoned the idea of running for governor and closed down C Group. The group of hotshot number crunchers, of whom Chesney was the hottest and crunchingest, had been sent back to the actuarial cohorts. In recognition of his outstanding work, Chesney had been upgraded to a level three actuary, which qualified him not only for a raise and more benefits, but an actual fourth-floor office – though not on a corner and with only one window.

  "So I've got a pretty bright future with Paxton's," he told Melda.

  "Not once the ice queen starts to remember what happened," she said.

  "She won't," the young man said. "And you shouldn't call her the ice queen. She's had a rough time."

  "Who hasn't?" said Melda. Her small face under straight-cut brown bangs compressed its fine features in thought. "Maybe Poppy won't remember," she said. "But she's going to get a sick turn every time she runs into you. It won't be too long before she gets daddy to turf you out."

  Chesney's instinct was to deny the likelihood. But he checked himself. Melda was better than he was at this kind of thinking. Human nature was one of her pools of light and she could spot details he would always miss. He'd only seen Poppy Paxton once in the two weeks since the events that had cost the young woman her memory and her ability to sleep through the night. She'd been sitting in the back of her father's limousine, the long black car idling at the curb, waiting for W.T. to come out.

  Chesney had come down the front steps of the Paxton Building. She had glanced at him through the tinted window, and their eyes had met. He'd seen her react, her already pale face going white and her eyes widening. She'd looked away, and said something sharply to the chauffeur. The car had driven off.

  "You may be right," Chesney said, "but still, I can get a good job somewhere else. I have a thing for numbers."

  She was going to say something, but didn't. "Eat your tomato," she said, pushing the food gently back toward his lips, "before it drips on your shirt. We can talk about this some other time."

  Chesney ate the tomato and the last half sandwich. He deliberately did not think about the things they'd been discussing. Melda passed him a soft drink and he washed the food down, while she repacked the empty containers in the cooler. After she closed the lid, she said, "What'll we do now?"

  "Um," Chesney said.

  She made a little noise in her throat. "That's what I thought you'd say." She stood up. "Your place is closer."

  TWO

  The demon appeared on the stroke of midnight, its everpresent Churchill sticking out the side of its jaw, behind one of the sabertooth fangs. Xaphan removed the cigar, drained the tumbler of rum in its other hand, then tossed the glass into the air. It rose, stopped, and disappeared. "Costume?" the fiend said.

  "Costume," said Chesney and instantly he was clad from head to foot in skintight blue and gray – he liked Batman's colors – with a half-mask that left only his eyes, mouth and chin showing. He had modified the outfit after his original outings: the long gauntlets had proved cumbersome so he had replaced them with wrist-length gloves of gray; the original calf-high boots were now something like a low-cut deck shoe. Somehow the effect was more modern.

  He checked himself in the full-length mirror in his bedroom and for a moment was distracted by a memory of scenes that had been reflected in that same length of glass only hours before. Melda had stayed through the afternoon and they had ordered in pizza for supper. The pause for food gave them renewed energy; and it was past nine o'clock before the rumpled young woman had called a cab and gone home. Chesney had collapsed back on the bed and slept a deep and dreamless sleep until the alarm woke him just before midnight.

  "All right," he said to his assistant, "is everything you told me earlier still good?"

  "Ain't the word I'd use," said the demon, "but it's all jake."

  "The game is on, in a… brothel?" It was only the second time in his life that Chesney had ever said the word; the first had been when he was ten and, having heard the term in the schoolyard, had asked his mother for its meaning. He could still taste the lavender-scented soap with which she had lathered his tongue.

  "You bet."

  His assistant had become more reliable since their earliest encounters – Chesney thought it was because Xaphan clearly valued the tobacco and liquor perquisites that came its way and which Chesney could revoke just by an exercise of his free will – but he knew he shouldn't take any spawn of Hell at its word. "Is there anything you aren't telling me?" he said.

  The enlarged weasel eyes looked at him sideways. "Yes."

  "What?"

  The demon began ticking off its stubby fingers: "The median annual temperature in Timbuktu, the middle name of the guy who stocks the meat cooler at the Safeway on Route 44, the measurements of the winner and first runner-up in last year's Miss Universe pageant, the–"

  "That's not what I meant!"

  "That's a relief," said the fiend. "We coulda been here all night."

  "Tell me about the poker game again – no, wait, show me what's going on there, right now."

  Xaphan gestured, and a screen the size of a top-model plasma TV appeared before Chesney's eyes. It was as if he were standing behind a thick-set man in shirtsleeves, sitting at a green felt-covered table. The crown of the man's head was bald and beaded with sweat. He was separating his cards after a draw; Chesney saw aces and tens, then the man fanned out the last card – another ten. "Bet five," he said, pushing a stack of chips toward the pile in the middle of the table. The pot was lit by a bright light overhead.

  Another player, long-faced and thin of hair, said, "Fold," and threw his cards into the middle.

  The player to his left, a triple-chinned blond with flushed cheeks, looked at the man who had made the bet and said, "Five grand?" His eyebrows went up. "What did you pick up?"

  "See me and I'll show you," said the first player.

  It looked to Chesney like any of the poker games he used to play with the other actuaries from Paxton Life and Casualty. "What makes it illegal?" he said.

  "See the guy here?" the demon said, pointing at the screen. A square-jawed man wearing an old-fashioned eyeshade held the deck in one hand and was picking up the cards that the man who folded had tossed into the pot. "He's the house. He don't play and he collects a percentage of the money when they settle up at the end. That's against the law in this state."

  "Is the dealer a member of organized crime?"

  "Name's Sal Feore. It's a mob-run game. In a mob-run cathouse. Look." The fiend made the image change, as if a camera had pulled back for a wider shot. In the darker reaches of the room, Chesney saw couches and chairs on which sat women wearing next to nothing. A tall redhead crossed the room from left to right, bringing a glass of whiskey to one of the players; she wore nothing but a smile and a pair of high heels.

  "Sheesh," said Chesney. Still, he wanted to be certain that he was operating in a pool of light
as clear as that which illuminated the poker table. "And the players, you said they're racketeers."

  "No, you said that. I said they do shady deals. Bribes, kickbacks, a little of the old now-you-see-it, now-you-don't."

  "Give me a for-instance," the young man said. "The guy who bet five thousand, what's his game?"

  The demon said, "That mug? He's into a lot of different things. He's one of the partners in that new development that's going in on the south side – a silent partner, if you know what I mean."

  "Let's say I don't," said Chesney.

  "He gets three per cent of the revenues, but his name don't appear on no deeds or contracts. And what he gets don't appear on his tax return neither."

  "Why do they give him three per cent? What does he put in?"

  Xaphan tapped ash from its cigar. "He makes sure that no city inspectors come sniffin' around the site, maybe holdin' things up."

  "A corrupt official!" said Chesney.

  "Couldn'ta said it better myself. The guy's on the take."

  "And the others?"

  "Skinny guy who folded, he fixes traffic tickets in the DA's office, makes sure paperwork gets lost, tells cops to look the other way."

  "What about the fat one?"

  "Banker."

  "What's wrong with that?"

  "He takes dirty money, makes it clean."

  Chesney had heard enough. "Let's bust them!"

  "Okay. How you wanna go about it?"

  "What do you suggest?"

  The demon puffed his cigar and said, "Thing is, these mugs got juice downtown. That's why their game never gets raided."

  "So we can't just tie them up and call Lieutenant Denby?"

  "Nah. He'd get overruled, soon as they heard the address."

  "Then what do we do?"

  "We could cheat."

  "What do you mean?"

  The demon smiled a weasel smile. "We change the address." He gestured at the screen, which now showed the players and the women in a new location.

  An illegal poker game, even one attended by scantily clad ladies of the evening, did not constitute a major crime. So Lieutenant Denby, as the on-call duty officer of the Major Crimes Squad, was not called at home and summoned to Police Central when the outraged telephone calls began to clog the department's switchboard a few minutes after midnight. The responsibility for first response fell to two uniformed officers on patrol in a car painted black and white and with blue and red lights on top.

  The lights were flashing when the policemen showed up, but the several people seated around the poker table or on chairs and other furniture tastefully arranged around the scene paid them no attention. The senior of the two patrolmen, George "Tick" Webber, radioed in that the pair might need back-up; then he and his younger partner, Carmela Ortiz, got out of the vehicle and approached the group.

  "Holy…" Webber began, then found himself at a loss for words as he watched the tall naked redhead saunter across the open space and hand one of the players a glass of what the patrolman presumed to be liquor being illegally consumed in a public place. The man accepted the drink and patted the woman's well formed buttock, then returned his attention to the cards. It was only then that Ortiz drew his attention to the activity that was being transacted between a paunchy middle-aged man seated on a couch in his underwear while a young brunette with an apparently high tolerance for silicone knelt before him and made herself useful in a manner that was still technically illegal in several parts of the Bible Belt.

  "Hey!" Officer Webber shouted. "Stop that!" Nobody paid him any attention. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. Ortiz was reaching for her weapon. "Wait," he told her, then lifted his portable radio and said, "Dispatch, alert the command sergeant. We are going to need two paddy wagons and at least two more teams of patrolmen."

  The radio crackled. "Backup's on the way. Is it gangrelated?"

  Webber knew better than to use expletives over police band airwaves. Certain civic-minded citizens, their ears glued to police monitors, made a point of calling Com missioner Hanshaw and Mayor Greeley if those ears were affronted by low and rough language. "No, it's…" – he sought for a word then went with – "perversion-related."

  "The funny thing is," Ortiz said, "they act like we're not even here." Sirens sounded in the distance, coming rapidly closer. "See that? Sirens, our lights, and they don't even look round."

  The brunette was speeding up her rhythm. The heavybellied man on the couch groaned.

  Webber looked around. Civic Plaza was only three blocks from Police Central. More blue lights were visible in the direction of headquarters, coming closer fast. He turned back to the scene before him: a carpeted, furnished room; men playing poker; near-naked women who were obviously not their wives or girlfriends lounging around or performing intimate acts. And all of it was taking place right smack dab in the middle of the brightly lit Civic Plaza, a broad expanse of pavement, fountains and benches that stretched from the imposing classical facade of the Justice Center on the square's east side to the chrome-and-glass modernity of City Hall on the west. Worse yet, the north side of the plaza was lined with upmarket, high-rise condominium towers whose residents were some of the city's cream. Quite a few of those worthies were standing on their balconies, some of them in their nightclothes, and several with phones to their lips.

  From high above, Webber heard a voice that was used to issuing orders and seeing them obeyed. "Officers," it said, "do your duty!"

  "I guess we're gonna," Webber said to Ortiz. With his hand on his holstered nine-millimeter pistol, he stepped between two armchairs and said, "Nobody move!"

  Later, describing the moment to the command sergeant, the officer would say that it was as if he had stepped though a wall and suddenly become visible to the people around the table. A fat, blond man jumped up and said, "Holy," in just the same tone as Webber had used the word, but he followed it with an even shorter word that described an act most people considered pleasurable but not holy.

  One of the women screamed. The redhead stared at Webber and said, "How did you do that?" then jumped back startled, when Officer Ortiz followed him onto the carpet.

  And then, as the back-up cars screeched to a halt just short of the scene, with the two paddy wagons coming up behind, followed by a TV crew's satellite-equipped van, the card players and courtesans looked around as if seeing for the first time that they were out in the middle of Civic Plaza. They said things like, "What the…" and "What happened?"

  Only the kneeling brunette and the man who was the focus of her attention failed to notice, both being fully occupied in their transaction. Ortiz went over to them, tapped the woman on the shoulder and said, "You'll have to finish that later, hon."

  As the skinny man was cuffed and led away, he said to Officer Webber, "Do you know who I am?"

  "No," said the patrolman, "but I can't wait to find out."

  Lieutenant Denby was roused from his bed and ordered to the Commissioner's office forthwith. He pulled on his suit trousers and jacket over his pajamas and by the time he exited his front door a black-and-white was idling at the curb. They drove down to Police Central through the empty streets on a code three, lights and sirens going full tilt.

  The commissioner looked to have dressed just as quickly as the lieutenant. So did the district attorney. The mayor made a better showing, in black tie and shined shoes, but that was only because he hadn't been in bed, having spent the evening with a the majority leader of the state senate and their wives at the gala season's opening of the city's symphony. The chief of police, John Edgar Hoople – his mother had been an admirer of the FBI's red-busting efforts – arrived just after Denby, buttoning up his uniform tunic as he came out of the private elevator from the basement parking garage.

  A few aides were scattered around the spacious office, but this was a meeting of the old bulls seated around the commissioner's desk. Commissioner Hanshaw reached into the bottom-left drawer and brought out a bottle of twelve year-old Scotch, while one
of his aides collected glasses from a sideboard and passed them around to the silverbacks before withdrawing to the outer reaches.

  Hanshaw poured more than a splash into each man's glass and nobody said a word before he, the mayor, the chief and the DA had all upended their drinks and thrown back the liquor. Then the commissioner said, "What the Hell was that all about?"